Advances in Vocational Psychology

Volume 1: the Assessment of interests

W. Bruce Walsh, Samuel H. Osipow, W. Bruce Walsh, Samuel H. Osipow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781138461925
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135059842
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Advances in Vocational Psychology devoted to presenting and evaluating important advances in the field of interest measurement. Progress in three well known interest inventories -- the Strong Campbell Interest Inventory, the Kuder Occupational Interest Survey, and the Self Directed Search -- is closely examined. A focus on innovations in interest measurement directs attention to how more recent instruments provide technical and conceptual advances over older, more reliable ones. Both research and counseling perspectives combine to provide a well-balanced guide to the study of vocational psychology. How interest inventories can be used beneficially in the career counseling of minority and majority populations is also explored.

1
	Strong Vocational Interest Blank/Strong-Campbell Interest Inventory

Jo-Ida C. Hansen

Center for Interest Measurement Research
University of Minnesota

The current version of the Strong Interest Inventory, the Strong Vocational Interest Blank/Strong-Campbell Interest Inventory (SVIB-SCII), was completely revised in 1985. This edition features 264 scales including 6 General Occupational Themes (GOT), 23 Basic Interest Scales (BIS), 207 Occupational Scales, 2 Special Scales, and 26 Administrative Indexes. This compares to the earliest form of the Strong that included only 10 Occupational Scales on the profile. A sample of the 1985 edition of the profile is shown in Fig. 1.1.

MATERIALS FOR THE SVIB-SCII

The Strong Inventory booklet contains 325 items to which the respondent is asked to answer like, indifferent, or dislike, to indicate how she or he feels about each of the listed occupations, school subjects, occupational activities, leisure activities, types of people, and her or his own characteristics. Samples of the items are given in Table 1.1.

Because of the large number of scales on the Strong profile, and because many of the scales are more than 60 items long, templates are not available for handscoring, and this inventory must be scored by computer. The responses of the individual are analyzed, scores are computed for each of the scales, and the results are printed on a profile. The results also may be printed in the form of an interpretive report that provides the user with additional information about the relationship of the scores to one another. Interpretive reports are especially useful

FIG. 1.1 Profile for the Strong Vocational Interest Blank/Strong-Campbell Interest Inventory. Reproduced by special permission of the Publisher, Consulting Psychologists Press, Inc., Palo Alto, CA 94306, from Strong-Campbell Interest Inventory by Edward K. Strong, Jr., David P. Campbell, and Jo-Ida C. Hansen (c) 1933, 1938, 1945, 1946, 1966, 1968, 1974, 1981, 1983, 1985. Further reproduction is prohibited without the Publisher's consent.

TABLE 1.1
Samples of Items in the Strong Inventory Booklet

in group interpretations when the time the counselor has to explain the results individually may be somewhat limited; the interpretive report helps respondents to refresh their memories as they review the results later on their own.

Two manuals are available to assist users in learning the intricacies of the Strong profile: The Manual for the SVIB-SCII (Hansen & Campbell, 1985) is the technical resource and includes data on the construction and validation of all of the scales; the User's Guide to the SVIB-SCII (Hansen, 1984) is the interpretive resource and includes theoretical possibilities, research findings, clinical knowledge and occupational information along with case studies illustrating the interpretive nuances of the inventory.

USES OF THE STRONG

The earliest versions of the Strong (1927, 1933, 1938, 1946) were designed to measure how similar a person's interests were compared to those of people in specific occupations; this was done using the empirically constructed Occupational Scales. But with the addition of the Basic Interest Scales (BIS) in the 1960s and the General Occupational Themes (GOT) in the 1970s, the uses for the instrument were greatly expanded. Now the inventory is used to identify not only an individual's occupational interests, but also her or his: (a) interest in being around different types of people; (b) interest in various leisure activities; and (c) interest in working or living in a variety of environments. However, career counseling of students and employees continues to be the major use of the inventory.

Within the career counseling context, the instrument is employed with several possible goals that depend to a large extent on the individual's motivation for exploring careers. Some clients wish to expand their career considerations by identifying interests that they may not have explored in the past; other individuals merely are interested in confirming a choice that they already have made; still others are at the stage in their career identification that requires reduction of the number of possibilities that they are considering. In all of these cases, the Strong serves as a method for efficiently identifying the person's interests and then for organizing them into a world-of-work structure that helps the person to integrate the new interest information with what she or he already knows about herself or himself from past experiences.

The Strong also is used in some settings as a selection and placement tool for making employment and training decisions. Typically, the inventory would be one of several assessment devices used to gather information about the individual and would be only one part of the entire package used to make decisions.

Finally, the Strong is used in research as the instrument employed to measure interests. For example, recent studies have used the Strong to look at: (a) general societal trends (Hansen, 1982a); (b) the interests of people in other cultures (Fouad, 1984); (c) the structure of interests of minorities (Fouad, Cudeck, & Hansen, 1984); and (d) constructs of Holland's theory of interest types (Swanson & Hansen, in press).

ADMINISTERING THE STRONG INVENTORY

The reading level of the Strong Inventory is about the sixth grade level. However, it usually is not administered before the eighth or ninth grade (ages 13 to 15), because most people's interest patterns have not developed enough to be identified before that age. The GOT scales and BIS especially are useful with young individuals who are just beginning to think about careers. These scales provide an introduction to the world of work and indicate where interests are beginning to emerge even if complete patterns of interests have not developed yet. The appropriate age for using the Strong Inventory actually spans 50 years, because the inventory is used with high school and college students, with people considering midcareer changes and occupational or career reentry, and with people preparing for retirement.

The Strong Inventory can be administered individually or in groups by following the simple instructions found on the item booklet. It takes about 20–30 minutes to complete.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

The long line of Strong Interest Inventories was first published in 1927, but its history extends farther than even that early date suggests. As with all interest inventories, the instrument depends on its item pool for its psychometric integrity; within the item pool lies the power of the instrument to differentiate the interests of occupations, to identify clusters of interests and, ultimately, to predict occupational choice which, of course, is the primary application of interest measurement.

The Strong Inventory's item pool had its beginning in a seminar conducted at Carnegie Institute of Technology under the direction of Clarence S. Yoakum in 1919. That initial pool of 1,000 items found its way into many different published inventories over the subsequent 10 years (e.g., Occupational Interest Inventory, Freyd, 1923; Interest Report Blank, Cowdery, 1926; General Interest Survey, Kornhauser, 1927; Purdue Interest Report, Remmers, 1929; and Interest Analysis Blank, Hubbard, 1930).

The Strong, however, is the one inventory of all of those that used some portion of that early item pool still in use today. One of the reasons for the instrument's survival over so many years and for its salvation from obsolescence is that the Strong has been updated periodically, and the updates have occurred frequently in recent years.

Forms of the Strong

The first form of the Strong developed by E. K. Strong, Jr., to measure the interests of men and based on norms only for men, was published in 1927. The first form for women was developed in 1933, also by E. K. Strong, Jr. This early work set the precedent for future revisions of the Strong. The men's form always was revised first, and eventually, the women's form was revised. For example, the men's form was revised in 1938 (called Form M) and the women's form in 1946 (called Form W). The men's form was revised again in 1966 (Form T399) and the women's form again in 1969 (Form Tw398). The consequence of this sequence of revisions is that the women's form always has been psychometrically superior to the men's form; new techniques and analyses were tried with the men's form, evaluated for a year or two, and then, modifications to improve the new additions were made at the time of the revision of the women's form.

In 1974 the first merged-sex inventory, meaning one form for both females and males, was published. The publication of this version of the Strong, called the Strong-Campbell Interest Inventory (SCII), marked the beginning of a concerted effort by the publisher of the Strong to produce an inventory that provided equal career exploration opportunities for both women and men. Subsequent revisions, in 1981 and 1985, were directed toward increasing the breadth of occupations represented on the profile to include those in areas previously considered untraditional for one sex or the other. For example, the profile now includes Occupational Scales that measure the interests of women who are carpenters, electricians, and police officers as well as Occupational Scales that measure the interests of men who are nurses, flight attendants, and occupational therapists.

Popularity of the Strong

The Strong is one of the most widely used, if not the most widely used, of all interest inventories. The latest studies exploring use of interest inventories in college counseling centers indicated that the Strong leads all others (Sell & Torres-Henry, 1979; Zytowski & Warman, 1982); about 1 million profiles are scored annually. Not only is the Strong used widely with a varied clientele (including high school and college students, adults considering midcareer changes or doing preretirement planning, minorities, cross-cultural populations and the disabled) in a variety of settings (educational, industrial, military, business, social service, consulting, rehabilitation and community service), but it also is used extensively in research efforts as the instrument chosen to operationalize occupational interests. For example, the eighth edition of the Mental Measurements Yearbook (Buros, 1978) lists 1,521 references for the SVIB-SCII.

THE 1985 VERSION OF THE SVIB-SCII

The 1985 version of the SVIB-SCII (Hansen & Campbell) has two major features that make it different from earlier forms of the inventory. First, the em...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: The Assessment of Interests
• Chapter 1 Strong Vocational Interest Blank/Strong-Campbell Interest Inventory
• Chapter 2 Advances in the Kuder Occupational Interest Survey
• Chapter 3 The Self-Directed Search
• Chapter 4 New Approaches to the Assessment of Interests
• Chapter 5 Special Groups and the Beneficial Use of Vocational Interest Inventories
• Author Index
• Subject Index