Jurisprudence

It's not enough....

gringo_911 — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 19:44:49 GMT

It's enough for you, but not for any intelligent individual.

Re: Any of those

Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 19:40:24 GMT

I don't think so. Most of the journals are APA so they're available full-text through PsycArticles, which requires a paid subscription. Some (Personnel Psychology, for instance) are available through EbscoHost. I don't think JStor has any I/O Psychology journals. If you'd like, I can round up the abstracts for the articles I cited. I figured my post was long enough without them, though, so I didn't bother before. haha

Because under the law

degsme — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 17:59:21 GMT

How does he do that by saying the respondent didn't meet their burden of proof?

Because under the TEXT of the law, there is no "burden of proof" on the respondant if they choose not to defend the test.

Kennedy essentially ruled (in a minority ruling) that the respondant could not opt to not defend the test unless they had "substantial evidence" they were going to get sued. IE unless they had been actually sued.

By modifying the Disparate Impact, Kennedy was able to deny its applicability and thus rule for Ricci even though Ricci really didn't have a case.

It was activism.

If the court has made ant change in the law they have made it easier to prove disparate treatment. ie a respondent will have to show via a strong showing of the evidence that an adverse employment action was not racially motivated.

No not at all. There is no actual precedent on the amount of evidence Ricci presented. Instead the ruling overturns to lower courts findings on the basis of Disparate Impact. All it does is cripple disparate impact by adding new text to the law.

Re: Define "plausible"

Tarkol — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 17:08:24 GMT

degsme:

Kennedy simply moves the burden back to the plaintiff CONTRARY to Legislative intent.

How does he do that by saying the respondent didn't meet their burden of proof?

The disparate impact test wasn't applied because they found for the plantiffs under disparate treatment. If the court has made ant change in the law they have made it easier to prove disparate treatment. ie a respondent will have to show via a strong showing of the evidence that an adverse employment action was not racially motivated.

Any of those

degsme — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 16:57:40 GMT

Any of those avalable online - even if only through JStor?

Define "plausible"

degsme — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 16:55:42 GMT

But herein lies the porblem. Your measure of "plausible" is mediated by your biases against Affirmative Action. So it really isn't that you are looking for plausibility but rather for any sort of plausble deniabilyt that there was a problem with the test.

Yet that is precisely why the disparate impact test was put in place. To move the burden of evidence onto those creating the disparate impact. Remember, part of why Disparate Impact law was passed was because the courts had made proof of disparate treatment extremely difficult to show. In fact unlike the Ricci ruling, ANY "plausible" alternative given - even if racial bigotry was involved - was accepted as a viable defense

Kennedy simply moves the burden back to the plaintiff CONTRARY to Legislative intent.

And yet you are looking for plausible deniability just like Kennedy

Re: Not buying it

Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 16:46:03 GMT

degsme:
"predictively unbiased" Sorry don't buy that this has been fully demonstrated at all.

Essentially this is just racial mythology repackaged as "science"

Evidence showing that tests are valid for Whites, but not for Blacks does not occur any more than would be expected solely by chance. Here are a handful of studies to support this statement.

Boehm (1977). Differential prediction: a methodological artifact? Journal of Applied Psychology, 62, 146-154.

Katzell & Dyer (1977). Differential validity revived. Journal of Applied Psychology, 62, 137-145.

O’Connor, Wexley, & Alexander (1975). Single group validity: fact or fallacy? Journal of Applied Psychology, 60, 352-355.

Schmidt, Bemer, & Hunter (1973). Racial differences in validity of employment tests: reality or illusion? Journal of Applied Psychology, 53, 5-9.

Furthermore, lower test scores among minorities are accompanied by subsequent lower job performance, the same as for Whites. Likewise, higher scores predict higher job performance. This holds for supervisory ratings and objective measures of performance. That is, they are not predictively biased. There is ample evidence to support this claim. Note that the first source is the American Psychological Association.

American Educational Research Association, American Psychological Association, & National Council of Measurement in Education (1999) Standards for educational and psychological testing. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association

Bartlett, Bobko, Mosier, & Hannan (1978). Testing for fairness with a moderated multiple regression strategy: an alternative to differential analysis. Personnel Psychology, 31, 233-241.

Gael & Grant (1972). Employment test validation for minority and nonminority telephone company service representatives. Journal of Applied Psychology, 56, 135-139.

Gael, Grant, & Ritchie (1975). Employment test validation for minority and nonminority clerks with work sample criteria. Journal of Applied Psychology, 60, 420-426.

Grant & Bray (1970). Validation of employment tests for telephone company installation and repair occupations, Journal of Applied Psychology, 54, 7-14.

Neisser, Boodoo, Bouchard, Boykin, Brody, Ceci, Halpern, Loehlin, Perloff, Sternberg,& Urbina (1996). Intelligence: knowns and unknowns. American Psychologist, 51, 77-101

Schmidt, Pearlman, & Hunter (1980). The validity and fairness of employment and educational tests for Hispanic Americans: a review and analysis. Personnel Psychology, 33, 705-724.

Sackett & Wilk (1994) Within-group norming and other forms of score adjustment in preemployment testing. American Psychologist, 49, 929-954.

Definition of "plausible"

degsme — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:44:05 GMT

And now you are asking for non-expertist to provide to other non-experts a "plausible" example that passes the biased views of those non-experts.

And that isn't second guessing experts how?

Not Even a "nice try"

degsme — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:42:08 GMT

Not even a "nice try" Tarkol.

Read the Ruling

The defendants responded that had they certified the test results, they could have faced Title VII liability for adopting a practice having a disparate impact on minority firefighters.
o o o

(b) Under Title VII, before an employer can engage in intentional discrimination for the asserted purpose of avoiding or remedying an unintentional, disparate impact, the employer must have a strong basis in evidence to believe it will be subject to disparate-impact liability if it fails to take the race-conscious, discriminatory action

Notice the underlined section. That text appears NOWHERE in the law OR the Legislative Intent at the time of signing.

It is created out of whole cloth by Kennedy, who REFUSES to rule as unconstitutional the idea that "an employer CAN engeg in intetional discrimination for the asserte purpose of avoiding or remedying unintentiona disparate impact"

Now YOU are making things up

Not Experts

degsme — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 07:50:34 GMT

No SCOTUS is not expert in bias. Very few judges are close to expert in the realms they judge. That's why you have "expert testimony" and its associated extra legal weight.

SCOTUS is ostensibly 'expert' in the Constitution and the law. But here you have a case where they said it was Constitutional, but then got 4 different interpretations of the law. No "expert" ruling supporting Ricci got more than 2 unique votes whereas DeStefano's position was upheld by a plurality of 4 votes. Hardly a "consistent" view from the "experts".

The general public that you don't think is competent to analyze this data is the same public that comprises the jury pool in the U.S. Here you are, a lawyer, implying that a jury of average Americans is INCOMPETENT to analyze the data presented to them in trials every day

Largely they are. Ever sat in on Jury deliberations? 12 Angry Men overstates the articulateness and rationality of the participants.

That's why NH did and would take this to a Judge, not a jury (their option). (and I'm not a lawyer, I just grew up with the law, find it fascinating, and one of my sons is on his way to becoming an atty).

One thing I've learned in my career is that hte "average guy on the street" makes rather poor decisions, but the diversity of beliefs essentially offsets the irrationality.

A misanthrope doesn't like people. I genuinely like people. I just don't have a lot of respect for their ability to reason. Most of their decisions are not reasoned, but emoted simply because they lack the skills (and sometimes ability) and interest to actually reason.

Well we probably won't

degsme — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 07:39:30 GMT

Well we probably won't agree, but I'm still curious if you can articulate more clearly what benefit is achieved by:

I believe that it is in the public interest to release the questions, and let people interpret them as they will

How is arming people with irrelevant data (since they lack the skills to make the analysis it is irrelevant data) "in the public interest"?

Not buying it

degsme — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 07:23:45 GMT

"predictively unbiased" Sorry don't buy that this has been fully demonstrated at all.

Essentially this is just racial mythology repackaged as "science"

Re: It's just not that hard

Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 02:14:55 GMT

The study of potential racial and gender bias in individual test items is a major research area today. The fact that research has established that total scores on ability and achievement tests are predictively unbiased raises the question of whether there is in fact any real bias at the item level. No theoretical rationale for expecting such bias has been advanced. It appears that findings of item bias (differential item functioning; DIP) can be explained by three factors: failure to control for measurement error in ability estimates, violations of the unidimensionality assumption required by DIP detection methods, and reliance on significance testing (causing tiny artifactual DIP effects to be statistically significant because sample sizes are very large). After taking into account these artifacts, there appears to be no evidence that items on currently used tests function differently in different racial and gender groups.

Hunter, J.E. & Schmidt, F.L. (2000). Racial and gender bias in ability and achievement tests. Resolving the apparent paradox. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 6, 151-158.

The article also mentions that identification of culturally loaded (potentially biased) items is notoriously difficult for both Black and White experts, professionally developed tests will likely be free of obviously biased items due to the rigors of development.

It'd be interesting to see the test, but I doubt there'd be any 'aha' revelations.

p.s. Hunter and Schmidt are two of the most respected researchers in the field of Industrial/Organizational Psychology and are more than qualified to speak on the subject. Well, Hunter died a few years ago, but I'm pretty sure Schmidt is still going strong.

Re: Highly contentions and difficult realm

Bondsman — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 21:45:03 GMT

degsme:

That it is a highly contentious realm doesn't make it difficult for experts. It DOES make it dificult for average persons. So there is no 'people deserve' any more than there is a "people require" every MD's diagnosis to elaborate on all of the reasoning and balancing processes involved.

The supreme court ARE experts though, and they agreed with Ricci's side.

I agree that we are in disagreement on what sort of claims of bias the avereage person can assess. Given that the majority of the public doesn't even have a BA, and half of them don't even have a HS Diploma, and of those that do have BAs, very very few have any sort of training in symbolic reasoning, its a bit hard to accept that the broader public will be informed by looking at these tests.

Another shocking post by you. The general public that you don't think is competent to analyze this data is the same public that comprises the jury pool in the U.S. Here you are, a lawyer, implying that a jury of average Americans is INCOMPETENT to analyze the data presented to them in trials every day. If you have no faith in the ability of a jury to analyze data and make a fair decision, you chose the wrong career - by a long shot.

Degs, one thing I've learned in *my* career is that the average guy on the street can and does make very reasoned decisions in serious matters providing the data are presented to them in terms they understand. If you don't believe that to be true... man, that's a seriously misanthropic attitude! I didn't expect it from you.

Openness will surely prevail

NickBanglo — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 20:51:01 GMT

My guess is that we're not going to agree on this... I believe that it is in the public interest to release the questions, and let people interpret them as they will. Wise readers will take counsel from knowledgable commentators, others will listen to blowhards like Limbaugh and Olbermann.

I would add, though, that generally the argument for keeping things out of the public domain because the public isn't capable of understanding the material is not likely to win in the end.