Applied HRM Research, 2001, Volume 6, Number 1, 13-32

Practitioners who rely on adverse impact analysis for the evaluation and development of selection procedures need to carefully consider the adequacy of the samples used to compute adverse impact statistics. A method is presented for estimating the minimum sample size needed to test for adverse impact with adequate statistical power. The required sample size is often extremely large, particularly for small effects when the selection rate and the proportion of minority applicants are small. However, smaller samples will be adequate when the magnitude of the group difference is large. ______________________________________________________________________________