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Provides a review of the recent literature on the selection and development of surgical trainees and surgeons, and discusses findings on the validity of psychometric measures of ability and personality in such processes. Drawing on this body of research, outlines the pilot project recently completed by the authors at St George’s Hospital in London, which sought to test the appropriateness of incorporating psychometrics in supporting the career development of junior doctors applying for surgical training. The results of this pilot study tend to confirm those provided by similar research on surgeons, as well as other clinical groups ‐ that psychometric measures have a significant role to play in aiding the assessment and career development of doctors.

The purpose of this study is to highlight and demonstrate how the study of stress and related responses in construction can best be measured and benchmarked effectively.

A range of perceptual and physiological measures are obtained across different time periods and during different activities in a fieldwork setting. Differences in the empirical results are analysed and implications for future studies of stress discussed.

The results of this study strongly support the use of multiple psychometrics and biosensors whenever biometrics are included in the study of stress. Perceptual, physiological and environmental factors are all shown to act in concert to impact stress. Strong conclusions on the potential drivers of stress should then only be considered when consistent results apply across multiple metrics, time periods and activities.

Stress is an incredibly complex condition. This study demonstrates why many current applications of biosensors to study stress in construction are not up to the task and provides empirical evidence on how future studies can be significantly improved.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study to focus explicitly on demonstrating the need for multiple research instruments and settings when studying stress or related conditions in construction.

Multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis techniques are commonly employed for the analysis of consumer perceptions of products. However, within the past 10‐15 years, a growing volume of research has shown that the processes underlying similarities judgements of stimuli are incompatible with the fundamental underlying axioms of these techniques. A series of papers in the psychometrics and cognitive psychology literatures by Tversky and his associates have demonstrated the inability of these procedures to handle similarities data from many domains by virtue of the restrictive assumptions they impose on the data. Recently, several procedures have been proposed that overcome the limitations of traditional multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis techniques. The potential benefits are illustrated of applying two of these newer techniques, additive similarity trees (ADDTREE) and extended similarity trees (EXTREE) in the context of marketing research. Consumers′ similarity judgements data are presented from three disparate product domains (newspapers, shops and breakfast cereals). In each case, non‐metric multidimensional scaling and average linkage cluster analysis yield less interpretable solutions than ADDTREE. In the case of the newspapers data, much richer insights are obtained with reference to EXTREE. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for market research studies and the development of consumer behaviour theory.

The remarkable concept of entrepreneurial orientation (EO) has attracted scholars’ attention for its relevance to a firm’s performance. Based on bibliometric and distance-based visualization of similarities (VOS) analysis, the purpose of this paper is to outline a broad-spectrum perspective of the structure of research in EO across more than 20 years of publications, identifying the most prominent journals, authors and articles in this field.

The paper uses the Web of Science Core Collection and the VOS viewer software. The analysis searches for all the documents connected to EO available in the database from 1976 to 2017. The graphical visualization maps the bibliographic data using both bibliographic coupling and co-citation data.

Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice Journal, Journal of Business Venturing and Family Business Review are the most relevant journals in the field. Among the many important authors in the EO literature, key contributors are Lumpkin, Payne, Short, Covin, Dess and Wiklund. Three different streams of research are linked to the EO concept; strategy and entrepreneurship, family business and miscellaneous work in psychometrics, methods, marketing and knowledge/capability-based approaches to organizations.

This paper contributes to EO research by providing a global perspective on the concept’s investigation, using bibliometric data and graphical networks.

Describes a development programme for junior and middle managers in an organization undergoing very radical change. After directors profiled demand for likely job characteristics, a range of data was collected for each manager comprising psychometrics, colleague surveys, and self‐report mindsets. Matching the “supply” of capabilities against the “demands” of future jobs led to the preparation of personal development plans, the implementation of which was assisted by participation in action learning sets. A presentation to a senior panel, including directors, marked an important milestone in the sets’ activities. The whole process was supported in‐house by trained facilitators drawn from the HR function.

Nursing teams supporting people with intellectual disabilities in inpatient settings are known to be vulnerable to burnout, compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma. Aspects such as resourcing, support, training and the fundamental challenges of supporting this patient group are known risk factors for these difficulties. The aim of this paper is to synthesise the literature on these issues and provide suggestions for operationalising solutions.

Literature on the experiences of nursing teams supporting people with intellectual disabilities in inpatient settings was considered, alongside the established offer of clinical psychologists working into these services.

There are common themes of staff’s emotional health and the impact this can have on patient care and the steps that managers and organisations can take to support their teams to remain emotionally healthy, compassionate and effective practitioners. Clinical psychology can play a role in offering this support only where services and teams are aware of the contribution they can make.

Clinical psychology has been undersold and under-represented in inpatient settings for people with intellectual disabilities, and this practice paper outlines the important contributions that they can make to the psychological well-being of all within the system, not just patients.

Describes a development programme for junior and middle managers in an organization undergoing very radical change. After directors profiled demand for likely job characteristics, a range of data was collected for each manager, comprising psychometrics, colleague surveys, and self‐report mindsets. Matching the “supply” of capabilities against the “demands” of future jobs led to the preparation of personal development plans, the implementation of which was assisted by participation in action learning sets. A presentation to a senior panel, including directors, marked an important milestone in the sets’ activities. The whole process was supported in‐house by trained facilitators drawn from the human resource function.

New measures in marketing are invariably created by using a psychometric approach based on Churchill's “scale development” procedure. This paper aims to compare and contrast Churchill's procedure with Rossiter's content‐validity approach to measurement, called C‐OAR‐SE.

The comparison of the two procedures is by rational argument and forms the theoretical first half of the paper. In the applied second half of the paper, three recent articles from the Journal of Marketing (JM) that introduce new constructs and measures are criticized and corrected from the C‐OAR‐SE perspective.

The C‐OAR‐SE method differs from Churchill's method by arguing for: total emphasis on achieving high content validity of the item(s) and answer scale – without which nothing else matters; use of single‐item measures for “basic” constructs and for the first‐order components of “abstract” constructs; abandonment of the “reflective” measurement model, along with its associated statistical techniques of factor analysis and coefficient alpha, arguing that all abstract constructs must be measured as “formative”; and abandonment of external validation methods, notably multitrait‐multimethod analysis (MTMM) and structural equation modeling (SEM), to be replaced by internal content‐validation of the measure itself. The C‐OAR‐SE method can be applied – as demonstrated in the last part of the article – by any verbally intelligent researcher. However, less confident researchers may need to seek the assistance of one or two colleagues who fully understand the new method.

If a measure is not highly content‐valid to begin with – and none of the new measures in the JM articles criticized is highly content‐valid – then no subsequent psychometric properties can save it. Highly content‐valid measures are absolutely necessary for proper tests of theories and hypotheses, and for obtaining trustworthy findings in marketing.

C‐OAR‐SE is completely original and Rossiter's updated version should be followed. C‐OAR‐SE is leading the necessary marketing measurement revolution.

The purpose of this single-case experimental design paper is to examine the efficacy of the high-dosage Life Minus Violence – Enhanced (LMV-E) programme with a small sample of four violent women in custody. All participants were undertaking LMV-E as one component of their treatment pathway in an Offender Personality Disorder (OPD) treatment service for women with personality disorder. The methodology employed an AB baseline design with a six-month baseline period, nine-month treatment period and six-month follow-up. Levels of direct and indirect aggression were recorded throughout the baseline, intervention, and follow-up period. In the follow-up period, women were engaging in further treatment. Psychometric measures linked to treatment domains were used to explore clinically significant and reliable change following the intervention. Clinical and reliable change was indicated in some treatment domains for each participant following the intervention. The pattern of these reductions varied between the women. The patterns of findings are discussed and recommendations presented.

The methodology employed an AB baseline design with a six-month baseline period, nine-month treatment period and six-month follow-up. Levels of direct and indirect aggression were recorded throughout the baseline, intervention and follow-up period. In the follow-up period, women were engaging in further treatment. Psychometric measures linked to treatment domains were used to explore clinically significant and reliable change following the intervention.

Clinical and reliable change was indicated in some treatment domains for each participant following the intervention. The pattern of these reductions varied between the female offenders. The patterns of findings are discussed and recommendations presented.

The LMV-E programme was associated with some positive improvements in treatment domains measured in a small sample of female violent offenders. Improvements to some degree were most commonly found in the domains of anger, emotional control and components of criminal thinking. It would be clinically useful to examine characteristics of individuals that appear to benefit most from particular interventions.

There are no existing published findings related to the implementation of LMV-E with females. Therefore, this paper provides preliminary contribution to the evidence base in this area.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how and why personality tests are used in workplace training. This research paper is guided by three research questions that inquire about the role of external and internal stakeholders, the value of psychometric and practical considerations in test selection, and the purpose of personality test use in workplace training.

This research paper uses multiple-case study analysis. Interviews, test reports, product flyers and email correspondence were collected and analyzed from publishers, associations, psychologists and human resource development (HRD) practitioners in Germany, the UK and The Netherlands between 2012 and 2016.

Themes emerge around industry tensions among practitioners and professional associations, psychologists and non-psychologists. Ease of use is a more important factor than psychometrics in the decision-making process. Also, practitioners welcome publishers that offer free coaching support. In the process of using tests for development rather than assessment, re-labeling takes place when practitioners and publishers use positive terms for personality tests as tools for personal stocktaking and development.

Despite extensive data collection and analysis efforts, this study is limited by its focus on a relatively small number of country cases and stakeholders per case.

By combining scientific evidence with practical application, stakeholders can take first steps toward more evidence-based HRD practice around personality testing in workplace training.

Little academic literature exists on the use of personality testing in workplace training. Without a clear understanding of the use of personality testing outside personnel selection, the current practice of personality tests for developmental purposes could raise ethical concerns about the rights and responsibilities of test takers.