The construct equivalence of the Customer Contact Styles Questionnaire (CCSQ7.2) for proctored and unproctored administration groups

Abstract

The advent of the Internet in personnel selection has brought with it many opportunities, challenges and concerns. The opportunities afforded to the employer include, among others, increased security, a reduction in the resources needed, reduced geographical constraints, reduced time to hire, immediate scoring and a lowering of costs. Owing to these benefits, the use of the Internet for psychological testing will continue to become more prevalent in personnel selection over the next few years. The use and acceptance of the Internet has encouraged organisations and assessment practitioners to make use of Internet-delivered testing as the preferred mode of administration, especially in view of the benefits that it offers to the employer, as well as to the candidate. Internet-delivered testing brings with it a few concerns and many organisations are still making use of the paper-and-pencil version of an instrument even though it is available in an online version. This is because of concerns over measurement equivalence, as the paper-and-pencil version is seen as a “safer” and more accepted mode of administration. There are also many test publishers that would like to take advantage of the practicability of Internet-delivered testing by converting their current selection procedures to an Internet format. This conversion cannot simply be assumed and needs to be examined and documented for each instrument. The primary purpose of this study is to determine the construct equivalence of the Customer Contact Styles Questionnaire (CCSQ7.2) when it is administered via paper-and-pencil in the presence of a proctor and when it is administered online in the absence of a proctor. The aim is to determine whether the online version of the CCSQ7.2 can be considered equivalent to its paper-and-pencil counterpart without loss of psychometric property. The results of the study revealed that the mode in which the CCSQ7.2 is administered does not compromise scale reliabilities and that the relationship between scales of the CCSQ7.2 are not affected by modes of administration. It can thus be said with confidence that the online version of the CCSQ7.2 can be considered equivalent to its paper-and-pencil counterpart without loss of psychometric property. Copyright