6.1.2 Participants

There were two sets of participants, from the United States and from Spain.

U.S. participants. There were 230 U.S. participants, 78 male, 149 female, 3 unidentified. The mean age was 35.8 years with a standard deviation of 13.5 years. The range was from 17 to 72 years of age. Mean time in the workplace was 6.7 years with a standard deviation of 7.9 years. Mean time in current position was 1.3 years with a standard deviation of 1.0 years. Job classifications of these participants included custodians, food-service workers in a dining hall, restaurant waiters and waitresses, salespeople, postal-service workers, taxi drivers, office personnel, and teachers.

Spanish participants. There were 227 Spanish participants, 112 male, 112 female, and 3 unidentified. The mean age was 36.1 years with a standard deviation of 9.8 years. The range was from 21 to 64 years of age. Mean time in the workplace was 7.6 years with a standard deviation of 8.6 years. Mean time in current position was 4.0 years with a standard deviation of 3.6 years. Job classifications of these participants clerks, bank office personnel, photography studio personnel, biology laboratory personnel, film developing studio personnel, lawyers' office support personnel, librarians, educational researchers, textbook editors, university teachers, air traffic controllers, administrative personnel of diverse institutions, and psychiatrists.

6.1.3 Design

The main dependent variables were responses to the performance-evaluation items (as answered by both workers and their supervisors). The main independent variables were scores on the ESJI.

6.1.4 Procedure

The ESJI administered individually in both the United States and Spain. The administration typically took 30-40 minutes, although the inventory was untimed. The instrument was constructed in the United States and then translated into Castilian Spanish by the Spanish team and checked for accuracy by a Spanish-speaking member of the U.S. team.

6.2 Results and discussion

6.2.1 Basic statistics and score distributions

Figure 2 (Panels A-F) shows the total-score distributions for each of the three methods of scoring for each of the samples (United States and Spain). Each figure also shows the mean and standard deviation for the given scoring system for the given sample, as well as the N on which the set of sample statistics is based.

The Spanish sample performed better than did the U.S. sample, although because the occupations of the Spanish and U.S. samples were not exactly equated, the samples may not have been strictly comparable. The differences were statistically significant at the .001 level, regardless of the measure used. For the distance scores, t₄₅₅ was equal to 8.47. For the rank-order correlation scores, the comparable t-value was 5.32, and for the 1/0 scores, 5.92.