Policy capturing

Article summary

Policy capturing or "the PC technique" is a statistical method used in social psychology to quantify the relationship between a person's judgement and the information that was used to make that judgement. Policy capturing assessments rely upon regression analysis models. Policy capturing is frequently used by businesses to assess employee performance. Policy capturing is a technique that is used to examine how individuals reach decisions. Policy capturing is regarded as a form of judgment analysis and has been applied to a variety of settings and contexts. A typical example was reported by Sherer, Schwab and Heneman (1987), in their study of how supervisors, in the setting of a private hospital, reach decisions about salary raises. Participants of this study, called judges, received information about a set of employees. The employees differed on five key factors: performance level was average or superior, performance was consistent or inconsistent, current salary was low, medium, or high, and the individuals either had or had not been offered another job from a different organization. After reading information about each employee, participants then decided whether the percentage and absolute increase in salary they would recommend. Which of these five factors shaped the decisions varied appreciably across the participants.…

Key claims

No claims recorded.

Discussion questions

1. Summarise the article in your own words. Which single claim would you verify first, and why?
2. Which claim in this article is most likely to be revised as the sources update? How would you check its current status?
3. If two sources disagreed about one of these facts, what would you need in order to trust one over the other?

Bibliography

No sources recorded.