Public Sector Assessment

The editors' goal in this special issue was to identify notable public sector "feats" that would be of interest to practitioners and academics alike. The articles they have included illustrate that there is a good deal of meaningful theory and research being developed and conducted in the public sector domain. One issue commonly faced by those engaged in public sector assessment is attending to the various constituencies that have a potential say in the procedures and processes that are implemented. For example, stakeholder groups can run the gamut from political entities to labor unions, in addition to management and system designers. No single, specific standard will necessarily appeal to all. Therefore, the first article in this issue develops a general framework for understanding and addressing the multiple and often conflicting standards for evaluating public sector selection systems. The following articles cover such topics as:
* the validation of a bus driver selection system;
* the identification of several individual and situational factors related to perceptions of job relevance in a sample of firefighters;
* the evaluation of two different strategies -- broad-based skill assessment and alternate test media -- for reducing adverse impact;
* the integration of meta-analytic procedures with simulation techniques to estimate optimal predictor weights in enhancing predictive validity; and
* the setting of appropriate -- and defensible -- cutoff scores in public sector assessment.