Journal of Vocational Behavior 55, 147154 (1999)

Article ID jvbe.1999.1704, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on

Assessing Career Indecision

Samuel H. Osipow
The Ohio State University
This paper discusses Hollands work toward the understanding and measurement of
career indecision that has grown out of his long-term theoretical and empirical efforts. A
general review of the history of career decision-making measures is included, along with
a brief discussion of the applications of career theory and measures to practices in
counseling. 1999 Academic Press
Key Words: career indecision; indecisiveness.

Career indecision has been a major concern of career psychologists for many
years. Originally focused on the problem of career decision making of students,
the issue now encompasses a broad life spectrum because of the increased
frequency of events that require people to revise their career decisions over their
life span. Instead of facing the need to make a career decision only during late
adolescence and early adulthood (if that was ever really the case) revised career
plans seem to be needed at a variety of life transitions. Each of these transitions
poses the potential for career indecision to occur. The awareness of this lifelong
need further increases the need to develop ways to measure and intervene in
career decision problems.
Prior to the 1960s, even though one of the most frequent problems college
students presented to career counselors was that of career indecision, there was
no standardized method to assess either the degree or the nature of career
indecision. The usual procedure followed when a measure of career indecision
was sought was to ask respondents to use a Likert-type scale to rate their status
with respect to one, two, or three questions about their degree of decidedness. In
addition, little effort was made to differentiate between indecision and indecisiveness. We now see indecision as a developmental phase through which
individuals may pass on their way to reaching a decision. Thus, we have come
to see career indecision as a state which comes and goes over time as a decision
is made, is implemented, grows obsolete, and eventually leads to the need to
make a new decision (producing a temporary state of indecision). The process
then begins again. It has been speculated that over the life span the time period
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over which the cycle occurs gradually widens, so that the frequency of the need
to make a career decision anew occurs less frequently.
Indecisiveness is a different process. Whereas indecision is a state that is
normal in human development, indecisiveness is not an ordinary part of human
growth and development, but is, instead, a personal trait which generalizes across
situations demanding decisions. Thus, the most common way for us to determine
whether or not an individuals career uncertainty is indecision or indecisiveness
is retrospectively. In other words, if someone repeatedly has trouble making
career or other decisions to the point where closure is not reached in time to
implement the appropriate behavior, we would probably see that person as
indecisive. An individual can be undecided without being indecisive. However,
an indecisive person would of necessity display undecided behavior at many
decision points during life.
Interest in assessing career indecision became widespread in the 1960s and
1970s. It was an era when many individuals had several career options, the result
of which often was indecision. In order to better assess counseling outcome,
reduction of indecision became an important issue. This was one of the forces
leading to the development of more standard measures of career indecision.
Hollands theory also came to the fore during this period. His theory was
originally formulated in the 1950s and has been revised and updated several
times, most recently in 1997. It presents an ideal way to approach career
indecision because one of the outcomes of the discrepancy between ones
personal type and ones choice or prospective choice is likely to be the inability
to decide. It is therefore, understandable, that one of the events John Holland
became concerned with was the measurement of indecision.
Career counselors are of necessity increasingly interested in treating people who
are undecided about options. In providing interventions to help people make better
and more timely decisions it is important to know whether the behavior observed is
indecision or indecisiveness. It has been assumed that counseling to resolve indecision would have a different face than would counseling dealing with indecisiveness
(although as far as I know there are no clear cut empirical studies to support this
view). Career counseling for indecision is usually a cognitive based approach in
which logical processes are employed in collecting, sifting, and evaluating relevant
career and personal information. Counseling for indecisiveness would will probably
resemble traditional therapy approaches that examine the personality antecedents of
the problem. Recently a point of view has developed that sees career counseling and
psychotherapy as having many common features (Hackett, 1993), perhaps particularly when assisting indecisive individuals. In addition, the emotional aspects of
career decision making are more widely appreciated by counselors, and conversely,
the cognitive aspects of personal counseling are seen to be more useful than formerly.
APPROACHES TO MEASURING INDECISION
When the first attempts were made to measure career indecision, there was no
theoretical context available to guide the effort. Hollands theory had the poten-

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149

tial to serve such a purpose. Since Hollands theory assigns people to various
personality types which correspond to career fields it is conceivable that those
who belong to two or more types equally would be likely to be undecided about
their careers. Such indecision would be most likely to result if the two types that
the individual scored the highest on were in fields quite different from each other.
For example, if a Realistic person scored equally high on the Social scale, a
reasonable prediction is that since these two very different types do not lead to
careers that would logically include characteristics of both or lead to job settings
satisfying both types, the result would be indecision. It is also conceivable that
a person with low scores on all of the types would not have interests sufficiently
crystallized to permit a commitment to one field to be made. A third possibility
is that a person with high scores on all fields would similarly have so many
interests that a decision might be hard to make. Finally, highly talented people,
who possess many career possibilities as a result of their wide-ranging abilities,
are likely to have trouble sorting among them. The result of that would be
indecision. The first three possibilities noted above could all be derived from
Hollands theory. The fourth one is related to the theory but the theory is not
necessary to lead to it.
In an early study dealing with career indecision, Holland and Holland (1977)
proposed that indecision is the result of difficulties in personal and vocational
identity. This study seems to have led to a more elaborate formulation of an
approach to measuring career indecision as reflected in an instrument known as
MY VOCATIONAL SITUATION (MVS) (Holland, Daiger, & Power, 1980;
Holland, Gottfredson & Power, 1980). The scale attempts to diagnose the
difficulties people have in vocational decision-making. According to Holland,
Daiger, and Power (1980) such difficulties result from issues related to vocational
identity, occupational information, and career barriers. The Vocational Identity
scale measures the clarity of an individuals goals, interests, and talents as they
relate to vocational decisions. The Occupational Information scale allows the
counselor to determine where, if anywhere, the clients career knowledge is
deficient. The Barriers scale provides a list of those obstacles that clients feel may
impede their career decision-making.
It should be clear that by using these three categories, the career counselor is
in a position to develop a treatment plan for intervening in the clients career
indecision. If Vocational Identify appears to be an issue, counseling to help
clarify and define the clients self-knowledge would be in order. If there appears
to be a lack of occupational information, this may easily be corrected through the
use of a variety of well-known sources, such as computer based career exploration problems or such occupational guides as the Gottfredson and Holland
DICTIONARY OF HOLLAND OCCUPATIONAL CODES (1996). If the Barriers scale reveals significant information about impediments to the career
decision-making process, these may be addressed directly in counseling.
At about the same time, Osipow, Carney, Winer, Yanico, and Koshier (1976)
were developing another similar but different approach to assessing career

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indecision. The CAREER DECISION SCALE (CDS) was the result of a series
of brainstorming sessions conducted by four of its authors (Osipow, Winer,
Koschier, & Yanico, 1975) in which an attempt was made to identify all, or at
least as many as possible of the reasons people offer to explain the sources of
their career indecision. (For a history of the development of the CAREER
DECISION SCALE see Winer, 1992.) Originally conceived as an instrument
which would identify specific sources of career indecision where each item could
stand by itself clearly enough to determine differential counseling interventions,
it evolved into a typological measure (Savickas & Jarjoura, 1991). Of the original
16 content items, various factor analyses revealed that the items were not
independent but could be separated into factors, usually four (for details, see the
CAREER DECISION SCALE MANUAL, Osipow, 1987). Although there has
been some controversy regarding the accuracy, or even of the existence of the
factors, (Laplante, Coallier, Sabourin, & Martin, 1994; Shimizu, Vondracek,
Schulenberg, & Hostetler, 1988; Schulenberg, Shimizu, Vondracek, & Hostetler,
1988; Shimizu, Vondracek, & Hostetler, 1994), it does appear that some organizing substructure exists. Most users of the instrument, however, do not rely on
the factor structure, but rather use the total indecision score of the measure as an
overall index of ones level of career indecision. Examination of a persons
responses to individual items can reveal information about the sources of the
indecision, which can then be used to direct counseling approaches to the
problem. Even more common, the instrument is used as a pre-post measure to
establish what, if any, changes have occurred in career indecision after counseling.
It is interesting to note that the CDS was an instrument derived totally from an
empirical approach. Yet another approach to the measurement of career indecision developed in the 1970s was Harrens (1976) ASSESSMENT OF CAREER
DECISION-MAKING. In a manner different from the CDS and MVD this
measure approached the issue of career indecision using Tiedemans and
OHaras (1963) framework to career development.
In more recent times, what appear to be second and third generation approaches to the measurement of career indecision have been appearing. Notable
among these is the measure of Chartrand, Robbins, Morrill, and Boggs (1990)
known as the CAREER FACTORS INVENTORY and Jones (1989) CAREER
DECISION PROFILE. These instruments approach career indecision with the
view that it is multidimensional. Such an approach allows a more precise
diagnosis of the causes of career indecision than do the earlier measures, and,
as a result, may be more effective in leading to counseling interventions.
Most recently, Gati, Krausz, and Osipow (1996) have developed an instrument
called the CAREER DECISION DIFFICULTIES QUESTIONNAIRE. In contrast to many of the earlier measures, this instrument has grown out of a
theoretical taxonomy of the difficulties encountered in the career decisionmaking process. The taxonomy strives to identify several categories of the
sources of career decision-making difficulties. It begins with dividing the diffi-

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151

culties into those that occur prior to beginning the decision making process and
those that occur during the process itself.
Those difficulties that occur prior to the process involve a lack of readiness
resulting from lack of motivation, indecisiveness, and those that result from
beliefs in dysfunctional myths about career decision making.
The difficulties that occur during the decision making process are further
subdivided into lack of information about the self, occupations, ways of obtaining information, and information about the career decision making process itself.
Under the category of inconsistent information are included problems resulting
from unreliable information, internal conflicts, and external conflicts.
A 44-item questionnaire was devised to measure each of these various issues,
the 44 items corresponding to the 44 difficulties identified in the theoretical
model. The resulting questionnaire is called the CAREER DECISION DIFFICULTIES QUESTIONNAIRE (CDDQ).
Results of several early studies (Gati, Krausz, & Osipow, 1996; Osipow &
Gati, 1998; Gati, Osipow, Krausz & Saka, in press) suggest that the instrument
has a sound psychometric base and has potential for applications in career
counseling. The structure of this instrument lends itself to the long sought goal
of achieving the differential problem, differential counseling approach to
career counseling. Individual items can be examined separately in the search for
clues to identify sources of decision-making problems that can be addressed
specifically in counseling. Or, since the instrument is composed of a number of
independent scales, the scale scores can be used to determine sources of difficulties, that, in turn, themselves, can be applied to the search for improved career
decision making outcomes.
Thus, sophistication in the assessment of career indecision has come a long
way since the early efforts of Osipow et al. (1976) and Holland, Daiger, and
Power (1980).
THE ASSESSMENT OF INDECISIVENESS
There is a literature studying indecisiveness. Originally motivated to help us
understand and identify those individuals in whom career indecision was a trait
rather than a state, more recent efforts in the study of indecisiveness have been
applied to the problems individuals have in dealing with decisions concerning a
range of major life issues including but not limited to career issues. It has been
very difficult to measure indecisiveness as a separate entity from indecision. One
problem has been in the identification of an appropriate criterion group. For
example, in the career area, the underlying cause of some portion of those
individuals who are undecided stems from transitory issues, such as those
measured by an instrument like the CDDQ, while others reflect more stable
personality factors. The difficulty is that since indecision and indecisiveness
often look the same, how do we know when someone is indecisive versus
undecided? If we cannot separate them, it becomes next to impossible to devise
a way to measure indecisiveness separately from indecision.

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Haraburda (1998) examined the problem of measuring indecisiveness. His dissertation includes an extensive review of the studies dealing with indecisiveness in a
variety of life domains. Haraburdas research (1996; 1998) has attempted to deal with
these problems inherent in measuring indecisiveness and have produced encouraging
preliminary results. Haraburda used a variety of situations in which to couch
indecision, ranging from career to numerous interpersonal issues. In his first study
(1996) he developed preliminary measures of indecisiveness across a variety of
domains and tested their validity against other, related measures. In his second study
(1998) he examined decisiveness in the context of conflict resolution and social
relationships using his scale, the MULTI-DOMAIN DECISIVENESS SCALE. He
found that subjects who scored high in decisiveness were less neurotic and had fewer
psychological symptoms than did those who were indecisive. Those subjects who
were low in decisiveness scored lower in such characteristics as extraversion,
openness to new experiences, agreeability, and conscientiousness, though these
characteristics were highly influenced by social desirability response styles. These
results allow us to speculate about the nature of those individuals who are indecisive
and consequently, to think further about the design of interventions to deal with
indecisiveness as opposed to indecision. The results also lead to the consideration of
the question of whether or not the personality attributes of the indecisive apply to the
undecided as well.
COUNSELING APPLICATIONS
Now that we can measure indecision in a reasonably adequate fashion, how
can we use that information in counseling to help people resolve their indecision
with a minimum of difficulty? Several directions emerge as possibilities.
The Campbell and Cellini (1981) TAXONOMY OF ADULT CAREER DEVELOPMENT PROBLEMS can be useful. This taxonomy uses a set of specific
statements about the problems people have in major career problem areas:
Career decision-making, the implementation of career plans, and adapting to
organizational and institutional events. More specifically and of special interest,
the sub-problem areas in the career decision-making category include gathering
information, generating, evaluating, and selecting alternatives, and formulating
plans for implementing decisions. The content of the major career indecision
scales relates to these problem areas, and, thus, can provide a way to differentially diagnose career indecision problems to focus interventions related specifically to an individuals own, particular problems.
Other measures also exist to help in this regard. The CAREER DECISIONMAKING SELF-EFFICACY SCALE (CSMSE) (Taylor & Betz, 1983) can
identify those aspects of the career decision making process itself in which
clients may be deficient. Having done that, emphasis in counseling can be placed
on helping individuals acquire the skills needed to progress further in their career
decision status. This measure can be especially useful in identifying the gaps in
a persons decision making skills that can point to specific issues for focus in
career counseling.

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153

Career self-efficacy itself is also a concept that may be important in resolving

career indecision. One such measure is the short form of the Task Specific Occupational Self-efficacy Scale (Osipow, Temple, & Rooney, 1993). This measure identifies the degree of self-efficacy an individual reports in each of four major content
areas related to careers. Having so identified the strengths and weaknesses individuals report in these four areas, the counselor can try to change the clients selfefficacy expectations to be more congruent with their objectives. This is especially
relevant if decision making is blocked by a sense that an objective is not attainable
because of uncertainty about ones capacity to perform adequately in preferred field.
A similar result can be obtained through the use of Swanson and Tokars
CAREER BARRIERS INVENTORY (CBI) (1991) which allows the identification
of those issues that clients perceive to block their entry into a chosen field. Identification of these barriers can lead to direct efforts in counseling to eliminate or
overcome them. The CDDQ (Gati et al., 1996) can be used in the same way: that is,
to identify specific features contributing to the individuals inability to make a career
decision and, thus, lead to attempts to directly resolve those barriers.
CONCLUSION
It is clear that the methods to assess various aspects of career indecision over
the past 25 years have become plentiful and sophisticated. These methods have
led to counseling applications, something that is a hallmark of Hollands approach to career issues.
It is impressive that John Holland could have done such seminal work on
indecision while at the same time doing all his other creative and innovative
theoretical development, instrumentation, and empirical research in the career
development field. His contribution to the understanding of career indecision is
one of the many several significant legacies Holland leaves to us.
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Received: February 15, 1999