My only experiences with police officer selection revolve around a city in Ohio during the 1970s. The city was a small, affluent suburb of Cleveland. It had hired two of my mentors to develop, test, and then possibly implement a selection system for police officers. As Ph.D. students, we were cheap labor for these two mentors. 

 Rather than going through an expensive, multi-year validation process which was very lucrative for the developers, my mentors could have considered “borrowing” a selection system from Cleveland, Ohio. This would have been tantamount to using “Validity Generalization”. There are many people who have argued that the situational specificity hypothesis of validity has not demonstrated any real value to the profession. 

 Your assignment (worth a possible 25 points is two-fold. First, using the book and other readily available resources (google, etc) clearly define the two related concepts of “the situational hypothesis of validity” and “validity generalization”. 

Then, as a selection expert, tell me whether you would have been willing to generalize the validity of a selection system that had been used successfully in a large, economically-diverse city such as Cleveland to the small, affluent, relatively homogenous suburb that had hired my mentors. Here is a straightforward template for organizing your output: Fill in the blanks.

Number 1 can be answered in one sentence; number 2 shouldn’t take more than a couple of sentences; and number 3 can be handled in one short paragraph. 

 1. The situational specificity hypothesis of validity refers to _________________ 

2. The definition of validity generalization is _____________________________ 

 3. As a selection expert, I would/would not (choose one) have been willing to generalize the validity of the selection system that had been developed and used in Cleveland, Ohio to the small, affluent suburb because_________________