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Organizational attraction measures are commonly used as surrogate assessments of organizational pursuit. Despite the range in content often encompassed by such instruments, no research has systematically examined the assumptions underlying their use. The authors address this issue by empirically distinguishing items assessing attractiveness, prestige, and behavioral intentions and by modeling their effects on organization pursuit. Undergraduates (N= 305) were randomly assigned to recmitment literature from one of five wellknown companies and were asked to respond to a series of items commonly used in past research. Analyses of the item responses suggested that three components of organizational attraction can be reliably distinguished and that their relation to organization-pursuit behavior corresponds to Fishbein and Ajzen's theory of reasoned action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors examined the influence of deviant scale items (i.e., items failing to adequately assess the construct of interest) on item parameter estimates of focal scale items and person parameter estimates through a comparison of item response theory (IRT) and classical test theory (CTT) methods. The authors used monte carlo methods to fully explore results found in a pilot investigation of job attitude data. They found that graded response model item discrimination parameter estimates were robust when the number of focal items was larger than the number of deviant items, when the focal items were more discriminating than the deviant items, and when the correlation between the focal and deviant items was positive. IRT discrimination estimates were typically more robust than CTT discrimination estimates. Under extremely unfavorable conditions, however, CTT estimates were more robust than the IRT estimates. For person parameter estimates, the robustness of estimates depended primarily on the correlation of the deviant items with the focal construct. Implications are discussed for researchers employing IRT or CTT methods in scale development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]