| Observation |
- Firsthand information.
- Simple to use.
- Verifies data from other sources.
- Useful for manual and psychomotor tasks.
|
- Time consuming.
- May bias worker performance.
- Small sample size.
- Requires skilled observer.
- Validity & reliability may be problematic.
- Not useful for jobs consisting of mostly mental tasks.
|
| Interview |
- Incumbent describes work.
- Can yield data about cognitive and psychomotor processes difficult to observe.
- Qualitative data can be examined.
- Works well for jobs with long job cycles.
|
- Requires experienced interviewer and well-designed questions.
- Difficult to combine data from disparate interviews.
- Data gathered is subjective and should be verified.
- May elicit extraneous data.
|
| Critical Incident |
- Analysis is based on concrete behavior.
|
- Scales require some expertise to develop.
|
| Diary |
- Collects data as events happen.
|
- Consistent and continuous entries may be difficult to obtain.
- Data not in standardized format.
|
| Checklist |
- Inexpensive.
- Easy to administer.
|
- May not include all important parts of work.
|
| Questionnaire |
- Does not require trained interviewer.
- Relatively less expensive.
- Can reach more workers.
- Data is standardized (structured).
|
- May be difficult to construct.
- May have low response rate.
- Responses may be incomplete.
- Responses may be difficult to interpret (open-ended).
|
| Technical Conference |
- Data from experience is superior to observation.
- Data is comprehensive.
- SME's chosen for expertise and competence.
|
- SME's may have trouble breaking work into tasks and describing work.
- Time consuming.
- Differences in opinion need to be resolved to consensus.
|
