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Measures an individual’s potential for correctional work; used for screening and placement

Harrison G. Gough

The Correctional Officers’ Interest Blank (COIB) consists of forty questions about interests and attitudes which, in the course of research spanning about twenty-five years, have been found to have good potential for predicting performance of correctional officers. The COIB is an attitude scale that identifies applicants and officers of both genders who possess the temperaments and personal qualities required for work in correctional agencies and institutions. Scoring information is only by special license, primarily restricted to state and federal correctional agencies and penal institutions.

• Identifies applicants and officers who show the temperament and qualities necessary for exceptional performance as a correctional officer
• Applicable for both male and female officers and candidates
• Forty-item instrument may be completed in approximately ten minutes

Since the COIB is used for selection purposes, access to the instrument and scoring guide is restricted. The Manual/Sampler set contains a sample copy of the instrument, but does not contain the Scoring Key. For purchase and use of the COIB, please contact Mind Garden, Inc.

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From the COIB Manual:

"The California Psychological Inventory scale correlating most highly with the COIB within each sample is Socialization (So). The So scale had its origin in a theory of psychopathic behavior (Gough, 1948) that postulated a deficiency in role-taking ability as the basic ingredient in clinical psychopathy, i.e., difficulty in seeing interpersonal and social issues from any perspective other than one's own, and problems in sensing what others feel and think will, if extreme, result in behavior that is improvident, invasive, and detrimental to the harmony and integration of any group. This theoretical perspective led to the development and extended validation (Gough, 1960) of the So scale, and more recently (Rosén, 1977), to a sophisticated multivariate analysis that furnished persuasive support for the scale's theoretical claims. The consistency of the correlations between the COIB and the So scale suggest that these implications for probity, sobriety, and a firm sense of right and wrong will hold for persons attaining high scores on the COIB....

From all the evidence reviewed it appears that scores on the COIB are moderately predictive of performance as a correctional officer, the median coefficient in cross-validating samples being .31, and are also moderately predictive of job stability with correlations of .30 and .17 with persistence in employment. The median correlation of .31 with ratings of performance, if corrected for an estimated general reliability of those ratings of .75, rises to .36. This coefficient of .36 may be taken as the best current estimate of validity of the test as a predictor of performance."

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