Internal Research and Development
Since 1951, HumRRO’s mission has been to provide state-of-the-art answers to the pressing challenges facing organizations and educational institutions. One ongoing means by which HumRRO supports this mission is through our Internal Research and Development Program (IR&D).
The IR&D Program’s goals are two-fold: (a) to encourage innovative research that extends HumRRO’s products and services and (b) to develop and expand capabilities that enable HumRRO to make major contributions to science and practice in the fields of Industrial-Organizational Psychology, Educational Measurement and Assessment, and Human Capital Management.
As of December 2009, 14 IR&D projects had been completed, 12 were currently active, and one was under consideration. Completed projects have involved topics such as (a) optimal person-job matching for improving the Army’s efficiency in assigning new recruits to the jobs for which they are most qualified; (b) development of a faking-resistant personality inventory; (c) improved methods of estimating inter-rater reliability when research designs deviate from “textbook” procedures; (d) development and demonstration of web-delivered training modules, including checks on learning, pre-and post-tests, and a practice exercise; and (e) development of a screening protocol for selecting field and phone survey interviewers.
Consistent with the program’s goals, HumRRO IR&D projects have contributed to both applied practice and to science. IR&D contributions have been realized through presentations at professional conferences and publications. For example, research associated with the development of a faking-resistant measure of personality traits was presented at several annual meetings of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) and has yielded several publications in refereed journals such as the Journal of Applied Psychology and Organizational Research Methods. In addition, early work on methods for estimating inter-rater reliability in “messy” real-world situations has been presented as a workshop for the Personnel Testing Council of Metropolitan Washington and as a master tutorial at an annual SIOP conference, and published in the Journal of Applied Psychology.
To track progress and to stay up-to-date about and involved in the IR&D projects, corporate officers conduct In-Progress Reviews for all active efforts. During those reviews, project directors describe the purpose, approach, and status of the project to include results, products, and benefits to HumRRO, science, and society. IR&D projects also are routinely briefed to the HumRRO staff as part of our in-service training program.
In sum, HumRRO’s IR&D Program provides our staff with an exciting means by which they can pose and investigate their own research questions – simultaneously satisfying their own curiosity and making innovative contributions to HumRRO’s capabilities and to science and society, at large.
