Identification and meta-analytic assessment of psychological constructs measured in employment interviews.

There has been a growing interest in understanding what constructs are assessed in the employment interview and the properties of those assessments. To address these issues, the authors developed a comprehensive taxonomy of 7 types of constructs that the interview could assess. Analysis of 338 ratings from 47 actual interview studies indicated that basic personality and applied social skills were the most frequently rated constructs in this taxonomy, followed by mental capability and job knowledge and skills. Further analysis suggested that high- and low-structure interviews tend to focus on different constructs. Taking both frequency and validity results into consideration, the findings suggest that at least part of the reason why structured interviews tend to have higher validity is because they focus more on constructs that have a stronger relationship with job performance. Limitations and directions for future research are discussed.

Differential effects of permanent and rotating shifts on self-report sleep length: a meta-analytic review.

STUDY OBJECTIVES: The current study used the meta-analytic technique to quantitatively assess the effects of permanent and rotating shift-work schedules on sleep length. DESIGN: A meta-analysis was completed on 36 primary studies resulting in 165 effect sizes. Effect sizes comparing shift-workers to a permanent day shift control group were calculated for permanent evening shifts, permanent night shifts, and morning, evening, and night shifts worked as part of slowly and rapidly rotating shift systems. SETTING: NA PATIENTS OR PARTICIPANTS: NA INTERVENTIONS: NA RESULTS: Permanent night shifts resulted in a decrease, whereas permanent evening shifts resulted in an increase in sleep length. The shifts within rotating schedules followed the same pattern, with the addition of morning shifts having a moderate detrimental effect on sleep length. Furthermore, the speed of shift rotation had an impact. Slowly rotating shifts, in general, had the least detrimental effect on sleep length of the permanent and rotating shift-work schedules studied here. The pattern of effects among morning, evening, and night shifts was the same for rapidly and slowly rotating shifts, with night shifts having the greatest detrimental effect, morning shifts having a moderate detrimental effect and evening shifts having a positive effect on sleep length. In addition, nights on rotating shifts had a greater negative effect on sleep length than permanent night shifts. CONCLUSIONS: Slowly rotating shifts have the least negative impact on sleep length of shift-work schedules including a night shift. However, permanent night shifts could be an alternative shift-work schedule in operational settings that require many workers at night.

Effects of sleep deprivation on performance: a meta-analysis.

To quantitatively describe the effects of sleep loss, we used meta-analysis, a technique relatively new to the sleep research field, to mathematically summarize data from 19 original research studies. Results of our analysis of 143 study coefficients and a total sample size of 1.932 suggest that overall sleep deprivation strongly impairs human functioning. Moreover, we found that mood is more affected by sleep deprivation than either cognitive or motor performance and that partial sleep deprivation has a more profound effect on functioning than either long-term or short-term sleep deprivation. In general, these results indicate that the effects of sleep deprivation may be underestimated in some narrative reviews, particularly those concerning the effects of partial sleep deprivation.