Journal of personality assessment
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Clinical Trial Controlled Clinical Trial
Item placement on a personality measure: effects on faking behavior and test measurement properties.
Although personality tests are widely used to select applicants for a variety of jobs, there is concern that such measures are fakable. One procedure used to minimize faking has been to disguise the true intent of personality tests by randomizing items such that items measuring similar constructs are dispersed throughout the test. In this study, we examined if item placement does influence the fakability and psychometric properties of a personality measure. ⋯ Results indicate that the grouped item placement format was more fakable for the Neuroticism and Conscientiousness scales. The test with items randomly placed fit the data better within the honest and applicant conditions. These findings demonstrate that the issue of item placement should be seriously considered before administering personality measures because different item presentations may affect the incidence of faking and the psychometric properties of the measure.