engleski

Measurement of socially desirable responding with over-claiming

Faking personality scales in personnel selection may threaten the quality and fairness of selection decisions. Thus, in selection process it is important to identify persons who fake their responses for personal benefit (e.g. to get a job). Past research revealed that traditional methods, like social desirability scales, generally failed to efficiently capture individual differences in faking and act as a suppressor or a moderator of the relationship between personality scale scores and job performance. Recently, a new measurement method – the over-claiming technique – was proposed (Paulhus et al., 2003) as an objective measure of overly positive self- presentations. The over-claiming is seen as a knowledge exaggeration, a respondent` s tendency to overestimate the familiarity with existing items and to claim familiarity with items that do not exist (i.e., foils). However, from the research evidence is not clear what is measured with the bias indices of the over-claiming technique: unconscious self-deceptive enhancement, intentional response distortion or both. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to further examine the construct validity of the over-claiming and find out if the bias indices can represent a valid measure of individual differences in faking. In the present study, two student samples completed Croatian version of the Over-claiming Questionnaire (OCQ) and a five factor personality questionnaire (IPIP-50 ; Goldberg et al., 2006) in different motivational conditions. Both samples first filled in the IPIP-50 in an “honest” condition and later on in a simulated, “applicant” condition. The first sample (N = 149) responded on the OCQ only in the “honest” condition whereas the second sample (N = 145) completed the OCQ only in the “applicant” condition. Since personality measures were collected in both conditions we were able to calculate direct measures of faking on the personality inventory (raw differences and residual scores. The results of correlation and regression analyses revealed that the relationship between over-claiming bias indices and direct measures of faking on personality scales, contrary to Bing et al. (2011) findings, did not support the construct validity of over-claiming as a measure of faking. However, the results supported Paulhus’ et al. (2003) original assumption that the over-claiming can best serve as an indicator of egoistic self-deceptive enhancement.

over-claiming; self-presentation; self-enhancement; faking; selection

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