Fairness in Selection and Assessment

Formal research on fairness in selection and assessment, and associated debate both public and academic, dates back to the late 1960s with the publication of a book (Kirkpatrick, Ewen, Barret, & Katzell, 1969) reporting a research study that investigated the social and technical problems associated with the fairness and validity of selection tests for different ethnic groups. The study stimulated the first phase of the debate about differential validity and differential prediction, which continued well into the next decade, leading to large numbers of published studies (see Arvey & Faley, 1988) claiming both the existence of differential validity and the opposite, that it was a statistical artifact.