Abstract

A personnel selection test in Korean nuclear power plant settings has been developed for preventing nuclear safety-accidents. This test is consisted of two parts : 'conscientiousness' and 'psychological unstability', which are regarded as important measurement concepts relating to accident-proneness. The procedures of the test construction are as follows. In a preliminary test, data of 237 college students were gathered and analyzed for item-selection. The final form of the test was administrated to 507 students and reliabilities and validities were measured. Internal consistency coefficients show .73~.95 range, and retest reliabilities keep in .67~.88 level. Factor analysis with principal component method explains 69.4% of variants and extracts 4 factors. Each factor include conscientiousness and 3 unstability scales, exclusively. This factor structure is confirmed again in confirmatory analysis. Correlation with SCL-90-R measuring psychopathology shows no or negative with conscientiousness and high positive with all of unstability sub-scales. For measuring criterion-related validity, the test was administrated to incumbent 68 nuclear operators and compared with subjective job performance evaluation result. 6 job performance evaluation scales such as stress, job performance, competency evaluation, accident experience, group communication, team performance, show significantly high positive correlation with conscientiousness part and high negative correlations with unstability sub-scales. Especially, accident experiences are positively correlated with depression, anxiety, anger, acting-out, impulsivity, vulnerability and defensiveness. Finally, the limitations of this study and suggestions for the following studies were discussed.