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Clark HR Extra Credit Article Summary Gender, Age, and Race Differences on Overt Integrity Tests: Results Across Four Large-Scale Job Applicant Data Sets by Ones and Viswesvaran Article 4 The authors used the responses from overt integrity tests over a sample of

724,806 job applicants and compared the demographic data for gender, age, and race to determine trends. The authors identified seven separate reasons for reexamining group differences on integrity tests. First, previous research in the area has confused group differences with adverse impact. A test that is said to have an adverse impact may be neutral, but instead have an adverse impact introduced at another part in a multistep hiring process. Second, before the Civil Rights Act of 1991, some integrity tests were graded with race-specific grading keys. Even though that is not true of the test used in the study, it confounds the results of cumulative studies, which do include the results from integrity tests from 1990 or earlier. Third, most of the previous research done on the topic has been done by unpublished technical experts. There have been comparatively few empirical studies to examine group differences on integrity tests in published literature. Even though the data may be the same, more studies on the matter are needed by organizational psychologists. Fourth, previous research has been based mostly on single integrity instruments. That means that none of the previous studies have focused on differences in gender, rage, and age f or more than one integrity test at a time.

Fifth, this study, unlike previous study, is done using actual job applicants. This makes it more credible than studies that used students pretending to be job applicants because there is more of a potential of remuneration, which could impact the job answers. Sixth, this group study is significantly larger than previous studies; in fact, the study used more than two percent of the full workforce. Seventh and finally, most of the previous research has been whites and blacks, and has ignored the presence of other races. Using this sample provides more information on minority groups including the traditionally Asian and American Indian minority groups. The research aimed to find four things: the magnitude of gender differences on overt integrity tests, the magnitude of age differences on overt integrity tests, whether or not there is an age-gender interaction on overt integrity tests, and whether there were differences in race on overt integrity tests. The methodology used three integrity tests across four different data sets. The results indicated that women tend to score 0.16 standard deviations higher than men on overt integrity tests, which may eventually result in higher hiring rates for women. Older applicants also tended to score 0.08 standard deviations higher than younger applicants. This does not, however, mean that youthful indiscretion leads to lower scores. The authors offer two alternative explanations. First, the way the variable is set up may have produced a systematic downward bias in age effect due to separating into below-40 and above-40 groups. Second, the dichotomization may have improperly pooled workers.