Professions that have conducted practice analyses include nursing, engineering, public accounting, management accounting, architecture, engineering and pharmacy. Information from a practice analysis is used for a variety of purposes including developing or verifying professional and licensing examinations, writing job descriptions, designing educational and training materials, and developing performance evaluation standards. A practice analysis is usually a massive research project. An enormous amount of data has to be collected, organized, sifted, reorganized, analyzed, summarized, and reported. The Research Imperative For a professional licensing or accreditation exam to be psychometrically defensible, its validity must be documented in accordance with testing and measurement standards.
Validity refers to the extent to which a test measures what it is intended to measure.
One of the most authoritative documents cited by testing and measurement experts is the Standards for Educational and Psychological Tests, which was developed in 1974 by a joint committee of the National Council on Measurement in Education, American Educational Research Association, and American Psychological Association. The test must be based on the work that people actually perform and the skills needed for competent performance. In 1978, the Civil Service Commission, Department of Justice, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission adopted the Federal Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures. These guidelines mandate a job analysis to satisfy the requirements for content validity. The UAB commissioned the Practice Analysis of the Public Relations Profession, so that the APR exam that is ultimately developed will be valid and psychometrically defensible.