Comparing Different Approaches for Obtaining Item Desirability Ratings

The effectiveness of forced-choice personality measures in preventing applicant faking may depend on how closely items comprising each forced-choice item-block are matched in terms of their desirability for the job. Item desirability matching is routinely performed on empirically obtained item desirability ratings and different approaches have been used interchangeably to obtain them. On a set of item desirability ratings obtained with the two most commonly used approaches, we show that the choice of collection approach matters and may play an important role in the forced-choice block assembly.