| The Behavioral Assessment Device for Police (B-PAD) is a pre-employment videotest designed to measure an applicant's competence in response to a variety of job-related situations. B-PAD has been administered to police applicants, rookies, and veteran police officers. Observation of a variety of unusual behaviors (special scores) in the responses of problem officers and applicants who failed their pre-employment psychological evaluations raised the question of the meaning of these special scores. Categories for the special scores are Aggressive Behavior, Breaking the Task, Extraneous Comments, Fails Instructions, Gestures, Inappropriate Comments, Offensive Demeanor, Premature Response Time, Self-Manipulations, and Slow Response Time. A preliminary investigation was conducted to determine if statistically significant differences existed between a group of 17 suitable (satisfactory employees for at least one year) and 17 unsuitable (dismissed from either the hiring process or from employment in less than one year, or found to be unsatisfactory by department administrators) police officers regarding each of the 10 special-score categories. Additionally the relationship between the occurrence of special scores and MMPI code-types was explored.;Special-score frequencies were tallied for each of the 10 categories, and proportions and t tests were used to determine if there were statistically significant differences between the suitable and unsuitable groups. Statistically significant differences were found between the 2 groups concerning special-score categories breaking the task, gestures, inappropriate comments, offensive behavior, and self-manipulations. A practical difference between the 2 groups was found on special-score categories aggressive behavior and failure to follow instructions. Recommendations for refinement of the scoring criteria of those categories is presented. There was no support for the existence of a relationship between the appearance of special-score behavior and MMPI elevated scales or code-types.;The data for this study--B-PAD videotapes, MMPI profiles, and employment status information--were collected previously over a 2-year period. Two raters established interrater reliability on the presence or absence of special-score behavior from 10 applicants' videotaped responses. There was 100% agreement on 9 of the 10 scenes. Intrarater reliability was established by the principal investigator and resulted in 100% agreement on all 10 scenes. |
