Marise Born - 27 October 2022

Situational Judgment Tests (SJTs) are a method in which respondents are asked to react to work- or study-related situation descriptions. The SJT-method is more than 100 years old and has most often been used for personnel and academic selection. SJTs have numerous appearances, varying from written

descriptions to virtual reality situations, with response options in the form of a rating format or open-ended responses. SJTs have been developed for many mostly non-cognitive constructs, such as leadership and integrity, but also for behavioristic prediction of future job- or study-performance without considering construct validity. One feature they have in common is that applicants like them, most probably, because of being absorbed in realistic but imaginary situations. SJTs are also known for having other positive features, such as a good predictive validity and less susceptibility to faking and bias. This webinar will focus on disentangling the how behind the working of SJTs by means of discussing the effects of SJTs’ building blocks: What do we know about the effects of situations, response formats, instruction types, and scoring methods of SJTs on this method’s effectiveness? To this end, I will discuss a series of studies conducted with my colleagues, which among other things have focused on the so-called implicit trait theory (ITP), recognizing how not to respond, instructing to judge what others would do, and faking. By combining our findings with research published by others on the workings of SJTs, and by comparing SJTs with the equivalent Assessment Center (AC-) method, I will draw several conclusions about the mechanisms of the SJT-method.