PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSESSMENT, WEEK 6: Part II

HOW TO FIND OUT A PERSON'S INTERESTS:

There are a number of ways to find out a person's interests.

1. Directly ask the person what his/her interests are.

Surprisingly, this method actually works and is a reasonably valid method.

However, people are often at a loss what their interests are and are unable to
pinpoint them objectively, or may have little awareness of how their particular
interests and the demands of the world of work will meet and work.

2. Assessment through likes and dislikes through inventories

● Perhaps, this method is the most popular and most advantageous method in
assessing interest.

● Likewise, this method permits an individual to compare their interests with

those of other people, and more specifically, with people in numerous
occupations.

● The pioneering work in the field of career interest measurement started with
the studies of two individuals.

● This started in 1972, when E. K. Strong, Jr. published the Strong Vocational
Interest Blank for Men (SVIB), an empirically based inventory that
compared a person's likes and dislikes with those of individuals in different
occupations.

● Throughout the years, the SVIB and its revisions became extremely popular
and were used frequently in both college settings and private practice.
 The Strong Interest Inventory (SII)

Brief Background

● Originally published in 1972, the Strong Vocational Interest Blank for

Men (SVIB) is the forefather of all career- interest inventories, developed by
E. K. Strong and originally published in1927.

● In 1933, a separate form for women was developed. The male and female
forms were each revised twice separately.

● Later, in 1974, the two gender forms were merged into one.

● The SVIB became the Strong Campbell Interest Inventory (SCII) and went
through thorough revisions, including the development of occupational
scales that were traditionally linked with the opposite sex.

For example, a nursing scale for males and a carpenter and electrician
scale for women.

● Recently, the name was changed to the Strong Interest Inventory (SII) (or
Strong for short), and a 1994 revision was published.

● Primarily, the Strong compares a person's career interests with those of

people who are satisfactorily employed in a wide assortment of occupations.

● It is thus a measure of interests, not of ability or competence.

The Strong comprised 325 items divided into seven sections.

Most of the items (first five sections) require the respondent to indicate:

● like, dislike, or indifferent to 131 occupations (Would you like to be a

lawyer? a psychiatrist?);
● 36 school subjects (calculus, history);

● 51 career-related activities (automotive; cooking; baking);

● 39 leisure activities (camping trips; cooking), and ;

● 24 types of people (Would you like to work with children? The elderly?
lawyers?).

● The primary goal of the Strong is to counsel high school and college
students as well as adults who are college graduates about their career
choices.

● It is particularly concentrated on those careers that appeal to college

graduates rather than blue-collar occupations or skilled trades such as
electricians and plumbers.

Hence, the Strong is geared primarily for age 17 and older.

● The Strong does not tell a person what career they should enter or where
they can be successful in the world of work.

● Rather, it just shows the person's interest in all areas in decreasing order.

Administration

The Strong Interest Inventory (SII) is not timed and takes about 20 to 30
minutes to complete.

It can be administered individually or in groups and is basically a self-

administered inventory. For computer scoring, the separate answer sheet must
be returned to the publisher.
 Scoring

The current version of the Strong needs to be computer-scored, and several

such services are available.

The Strong yields five sets of scores:

1. Administrative Indices
2. General Occupational Themes
3. Basic Interest Scales
4. Occupational Scales
5. Special Scales Scores on the Strong are, for the most part, presented as T
scores with a mean of 50 and SD of 10.

Interpretation

The Strong Interest Inventory (SII) profile yields a large amount of data,
which shows both a positive feature and a negative one.

The negative aspect comes about because a large amount of information

provides data not just on the career interests of the client but also on varied
aspects of their:

● their personality,
● their psychological functioning,
● and general psychic adjustment,

And hence demands a high degree of psychometric and psychological

sophistication from the counselor in interpreting and communicating the
results to the client.

Measuring Career Choice

"For what career is the client best suited?"

 Usually, this type of question is answered by a career- interest inventory
designed to help a client in various phases of career choice.

Numerous types of tests survey interests, aptitudes, skills, or special talents

that exist nowadays.

A lot of numerous types of tests that are designed to measure attitudes toward
work, confidence in one's skills, assumptions about careers, perceptions
regarding career barriers, and even dysfunctional career thoughts were also
created in the past decades.

For this module, we will focus solely on the Kuder Inventories.

The Kuder Inventories: Brief Background

Among the famous set of career-interest inventories that have dominated

psychological testing in this area, the inventories developed by Frederic Kuder
remain one of the popularly used tests.

Frederic Kuder developed three inventories, namely:

(1) the Kuder Vocational Preference Record (KVPR), designed for career
counseling of high-school students and adults;

(2) the Kuder General Interest Survey (KGIS), designed for use with junior
and senior high-school students in grades 6 through 12; and

(3) the Kuder Occupational Interest Survey (KOIS), used for grades 10
through adulthood.

The first two inventories showed scores in 10 general areas, which are the
following:

1. artistic
 2. clerical
3. computational
4. literary
5. mechanical
6. musical
7. outdoor
8. persuasive
9. scientific, and;
10.social service.

Last but not least, the KOIS, yields markedly more information, and our discussion
will focus primarily on this instrument.

The Kuder Occupational Interest Survey

● The KOIS is composed of 126 occupational scales, including the 48

college-major scales.

● The KOIS also has a number of validity indices, similar to Strong's

administrative indices, including an index that reflects number of items left
blank and a verification score that is basically a "fake good" scale.

Administration

● The KOIS is usually administered for 30 minutes to complete and is not

timed.

● It can be administered to one individual or to a large group administration.

Like the Strong, it too must be computer scored.

● The KOIS is suitable for high-school students in the 10th grade or beyond.

Scoring
According to its manual, scales on the KOIS are scored by means of a "lambda"
score, -which is a modified biserial correlation coefficient and is essentially an
index of similarity between a person's responses and the criterion group for each
scale.

Afterward, the lambda scores are used to rank order the scales to show the
magnitude of similarity.

Interpretation

The Kuder Inventory results usually show a profile sheet summarizing the test
scores in a listing of general, occupational interests (e.g., scientific, clerical, legal),
and occupations and college majors, all listed in decreasing order of similarity.

The report is grouped into four sections.

● The first section shows an analysis of answer patterns and considers

consistency.

● The second section ranks order interest patterns in contrast to the normative
sample of men and women.

● The central part of the KOIS report is presented in the third section. This
section orders the test taker in relation to men and women who are employed
in different occupations and are satisfied with their career choices.

● Last but not least, the fourth section of the report matches patterns of
interest to those of students who have selected different college majors.