Assessment

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

Modern psychological assessment began just over 100 years ago when Alfred Binet created the first intelligence test in 1905. Some 15 years later at Carnegie Institute of Technology, a number of pioneering psychologists were devising ways to measure vocational interests. From that work emerged in 1927 E. K. Strong's Vocational Interest Blank, a powerful and practical measure that has been revised and expanded over its 80-year history by leading psychologists. Today, the Strong Interest Inventory (Strong) is an icon of career assessment, and it illustrates many of the important ways that individuality can be measured to give meaning to career decisions.

People's responses to career inventories matter. Career assessment, as well as work life, has undergone sea changes since those early beginnings. The world of work is very different now than it was 80 years ago when the Strong began. Strong's first samples were often Stanford undergraduates, and they were exclusively male. His early work with working adults was exclusively with men; and in fact, he did not believe that women's interests were well focused. Today, women are the majority in many professional schools such as veterinary medicine, human medicine, and law. Women's scores on scales for leadership and academic achievement equal or exceed those of men. The validity, meaning, and implications of career measures for women are every bit as good as they are for men. Moreover, many career assessment tools appear to have good cross-cultural validity, both globally and across U.S. ethnic and minority groups.

Also, in the past 30–40 years, the kinds of constructs that can be usefully measured in career inventories have greatly expanded beyond interests. What interests (or disgusts) a person is still centrally important to career life, but there are also many other important things. Assessment across diverse domains is the keystone of vocational psychology. Most revolutionary has been Nancy Betz and Gail Hackett's 1981 adaptation of Albert Bandura's ideas of social agency to the theory and constructs of career self-efficacy. Moreover, personality measures are now recognized for their close links to educational and work life. There are many hints that some early personality dispositions may be causal for the development of other career inclinations, such as interests, self-efficacy, and satisfaction.

Robust Psychometrics in Career Assessment

The quality of measures in career assessment is as good as any area of psychological assessment. The meaning [Page 1407]of a measure for career counseling derives from its reliability and validity. Meaning rests on scale quality. The pioneers in career assessment 70 years ago, such as Strong, Frederic Kuder, and D. G. Paterson, were astutely attentive to reliability and validity. Developers of career measures since then have stood on the shoulders of these giants. Strong launched the empirical, criterion-based occupational scale and showed with decades-long longitudinal studies that interests of adults are quite stable. Kuder pioneered the concept of internal consistency underlying content scales with high homogeneity. In the late 1960s, David Campbell merged these kinds of scales in the Strong as he brought John Holland's content-based concepts to Strong's empiricism. In the current 2005 revision of the Strong, the internal consistency reliabilities for those Holland scales are all .90 or more.

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