INTERVIEW

Interview

Interview

Introduction

Psychology is an extensive subject, where learning can be applied to all aspects of an individual and society. The name psychology derives from Greek, Psyche meaning the mind, soul, spirit, and Logos meaning study, (Gross, 2001, p4). This essay will look at how this relatively new subject has developed different approaches and theories throughout the years. Today, several different branches of psychology have also developed and this essay will show some insight into them.

Philosophers had been discussing behaviour of people and animals for many years but it was not until 1879 that William Wundt (1832-1920) applied science to this. William Wundt opened the first psychology lab at the University of Leipzig in Germany, and here he began to experiment with the mind, developing the school of structuralism and introspection. Wundt carried out experiments on himself, trying to analyse the structure of his own mental processes, attempting to identify the structure of conscious. The failure of this type of experimentation was that only the individual can observe their own mental processes and as everyone is different, results cannot be measured. William James (1842-1910) then developed functionalism, which looked as how the mind operated rather than how the processes were structured. Both were key features of how psychology has developed in the field, although functionalism became more dominant and lead the way forward.

Interviews Psychological Perspective

Most of managers use interviews -- they are the second most popular selection tool after CV reviews. However, there are concerns, particularly among academics, that interviews are not particularly valid. Practitioners' perceptions range from the wildly optimistic (the majority) to generally negative (the minority).

The procedures clearly show that for predicting job performance, structured interviews, regardless of whether they are psychological, job-related, or situational, and are more valid than unstructured ones. When training performance is being predicted, however, the superiority of structured interviews disappears.

For predicting job performance, situational interviews proved better than job-related ones, and both are better than the psychological variety. For predicting training performance, though, the psychological interview redeems itself and has slightly better validity than job-related interviews.

Another procedure that challenges conventional wisdom is that when all types of interview are considered together, individual interviews are more valid than board (panel) ones. Even more surprising to many practitioners will be the tentative finding that accesses to cognitive test procedures (that is, IQ tests rather than personality tests) prior to interview may decrease the overall validity of the interview.

While the interview has been much maligned in the academic literature and business schools, this research shows that if practiced properly --and that is a big if -- it can have quite high predictive validity.

So how good are these procedures? The validity coefficients reported in this study are well above some forms of psychometric testing, and in line with validity data reported for forms of selection that have traditionally been considered more advanced, such as assessment centers.

A word of warning, though -- a structured interview is more than following an interview proforma, and an unstructured ...