Psychology research helps to improve the fairness and validity of psychometric tests.
Research by Dr Anna Brown – School of Psychology – University of Kent led to the development of novel personality assessment tools that are resistant to response biases and ‘faking good’ by candidates. Brown’s methodology enabled multiple world-leading test publishers and organisations, including SHL and Korn Ferry, to develop solutions that improve the validity of proprietary tests. Over five million individual psychological assessments incorporating this methodology have taken place in 37 different languages, across 40 different countries since August 2013. Publishers commend Brown’s ‘inspiring insights and actionable recommendations’ in recognition of her capacity to help them design ‘wonderful, innovative’ solution that maximise validity and fairness in assessment. Anna Brown has carried out a series of consultancies for organisations included in this case study offering methodological advice. Her clients also include Caliper, the German Federal Employment Agency, the Enrolment Management Association, ECHO Listening, Talent Q, Whelan & Associates and Talent Today.
Selected publications
Brown, A. (2016). Item Response Models for Forced-Choice Questionnaires: A Common Framework. Psychometrika, 81(1), 135-160.
Brown, A. (2016). Thurstonian Scaling of Compositional Questionnaire Data. Multivariate Behavioral Research, 51(2-3), 345-356.
Brown, A. & Maydeu-Olivares, A. (2018). Ordinal Factor Analysis of Graded-Preference Questionnaire Data. Structural Equation Modeling: A Multidisciplinary Journal, 25(4), 516-529.
DPC