To Be or Not to Be: Exploring the Nature of Positively and Negatively Keyed Personality Items in High-Stakes Testing.

Including equal numbers of positively and negatively keyed items is common in Five-Factor Model (FFM) personality measures. Much literature has demonstrated the presence of positive and negative keying factors in low-stakes testing situations, but there is a dearth of research investigating these factors in high-stakes testing. To address this gap, we investigated whether an FFM measure used in high-stakes testing was influenced by positive and negative keying factors.

Current misuses of multiple regression for investigating bivariate hypotheses: an example from the organizational domain.

By definition, multiple regression (MR) considers more than one predictor variable, and each variable's beta will depend on both its correlation with the criterion and its correlation with the other predictor(s). Despite ad nauseam coverage of this characteristic in organizational psychology and statistical texts, researchers' applications of MR in bivariate hypothesis testing has been the subject of recent and renewed interest. Accordingly, we conducted a targeted survey of the literature by coding articles, covering a five-year span from two top-tier organizational journals, that employed MR for testing bivariate relations.