American Civilization: An Introduction

This book offers a comprehensive and practical view of assessment-based personnel decisions not available elsewhere in a single source. The author believes that: *decisions about people in organizations--initial selection, promotion, assignment to special training--are properly based on predictions, literal or implicit, about their probable contributions to the organization; *good prediction requires well-formed hypotheses about personal characteristics that might be related to valued behavior at work; *these characteristics should be carefully assessed; and *the assessments and their use should be thoroughly evaluated. Guion also notes that, in his view, the field of assessment-based personnel selection (a prototypical personnel decision) seems not to have fully acknowledged changing situations, methods, and theories of measurement. Too often, hypotheses basic to personnel decisions have been limited by traditionally-used procedures for data collection and analysis. To evaluate assessment or measurement, most personnel selection literature emphasizes evidence of validity in the form of a "psychometric trinity" of mainly correlations describing criterion-related validity with occasional mention of content or construct validity. Typically, chapters on reliability and validity are different, even independent. In this book, evaluation combines them, presenting a variety of questions about the characteristic to be assessed and its definition, the care and thought used in developing a procedure for assessing it, the extent and nature of measurement errors, the defensibility of intended interpretations of scores, and evidence that the scores are related to jobs and organizational needs. Available books and articles tend to focus narrowly on particular methods of assessment (tests, interviews, or assessment centers), research methods (correlational), or problems (legally-defined fairness). Work, the labor market, organizations, and psychometric technology and theory have changed. These changes both permit and require some changes in the kinds of research hypotheses put forward for assessments and decisions. A broader, more comprehensive integrated approach to assessment-based decisions, encompassing both traditions and new ideas is needed--and provided by this book.

Table of Contents:
List of Plates.  List of Figures.  List of Tables.  Preface and Acknowledgements.  Chronology of Significant Dates in American History  1. The American Context  2. The Country  3. The People: Settlement and Immigration  4. The People: Women and Minorities  5. Political Institutions: The Federal Government  6. Political Institutions: Local Government  7. Foreign Policy  8. The Legal System  9. The Economy  10. Social Services  11. Education  12. The Media  13. Religion  14. The Arts, Sports and Leisure.  Further Reading.  Websites.  Appendix: Declaration of Independence in Congress, 4th July 1776.  The Constitution of the United States of America and Amendments.  Index

About the Author :
David Mauk is Senior Lecturer in North American Area Studies at the University of Oslo and is also the author of The Colony that Rose from the Sea: Norwegian Maritime Migration and Community in Brooklyn. John Oakland is the author of British Civilization (now in its 6<+>th<+> edition), Contemporary Britain, and British Civilization: A Student's Dictionary. He is a former Senior Lecturer in English at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.