Can we develop measures of hypothetical constructs?

A rational approach to item development and scoring was used to assess six dimensions considered relevant to a law enforcement position. Factor analys is, reliability analysis, and correlations with various other measures indi cated reasonable "construct validity" for three of the six original measure s. All six final measures were easily interpretable, but three were inconsi stent with our original concepts or were much more narrow representations o f the intended construct. All measures displayed low correlations with job performance measures.