Role of Knowledge and Experience in Situational Judgment Test Responses of Pharmacists and Pharmacy Students

Objective. To describe the role of examinee knowledge and experience in situational judgment test (SJT) response processes. Methods. Thirty participants (15 students and 15 pharmacists) completed a 12-item SJT on empathy. Each participant completed a think-aloud interview followed by a cognitive interview to elicit their understanding of the items and factors that influenced their response selections. Interviews were coded to identify references to general and job-specific knowledge and experiences. Utterances were quantified to explore differences in the occurrence based on the individual item, item setting (ie, health care or non-health care setting), participant type (ie, student or pharmacists), and empathy component being assessed (ie, affective or cognitive empathy). Results. Participants made 480 references to knowledge and experiences: 45.2% were job-specific knowledge or experiences, 27.5% were general knowledge or experiences, 17.9% related to a lack of experience, and 9.4% were nondescript and could not be distinguished. There were significant differences in the reference to general and job-specific knowledge or experiences based on whether the item scenario occurred in a health care or non-health care setting and the component of empathy being assessed. Experience references often included comments about location, actors, task, similarity, specificity, and recency; knowledge references were classified by information, strategies, and skills. Conclusion. Findings from this study suggest general and job-specific knowledge and experiences influence response processes in SJTs.