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Who Is the Culprit? A Commentary on Moderator Detection

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 August 2017

Hannah M. Markell  and
Jose M. Cortina
Hannah M. Markell*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, George Mason University
Jose M. Cortina
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, George Mason University
*
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Hannah M. Markell, George Mason University – Psychology, 4400 University Drive, David King Hall 3077, Fairfax, VA 22030. E-mail: hannahmarkell96@gmail.com
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Extract

Over the years, many in the field of organizational psychology have claimed that meta-analytic tests for moderators provide evidence for validity generalization (Schmidt & Hunter, 1977), a term first used in the middle of the last century (Mosier, 1950). In response, Tett, Hundley, and Christiansen (2017) advise caution when it comes to our inclination toward generalizing findings across workplaces/domains and urge precision in attaching meaning to the statistic we are generalizing. Their focal article was insightful and offers important recommendations for researchers regarding certain statistical indicators of unexplained variability, such as SDρ. In this commentary, we would like to make a different point about SDρ, namely that it, and other statistics based on residual variance, will be deflated due to the lack of variance in moderators. It is this lack of between-study variance, as much as anything else, that leads to misguided conclusions about validity generalization.

Type
Commentaries
Information
Industrial and Organizational Psychology , Volume 10 , Issue 3 , September 2017 , pp. 465 - 467
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology 2017 

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References

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