Campbell Interest and Skill Survey

History of the Survey's Development

Campbell developed the CISS building on his more than 30 years of experience in interest measurement research. Campbell's experience with interest measurement research began in 1959 when, as a graduate research assistant at the University of Minnesota, he became involved in revisions of the Strong Vocational Interest Blank (SVIB). After many years on the faculty at Minnesota researching and revising the SVIB, and later the Strong-Campbell Interest Inventory (SCII), Campbell was recruited to the Center for Creative Leadership in 1974 where he continued to develop other assessment instruments. Eventually, in 1988, he ended his professional ties with the developers of the SCII, and turned his focus to developing a new, easy to use survey with both interest and skills scales intended to be free of bias in vocabulary, norms, and profile presentation. Building on his long-term experience on the Board of Directors for National Computer Systems (NCS), Campbell chose NCS—now Pearson Assessments—as the publisher of the CISS in 1992.

Item Content

Campbell carefully selected 320 items for the CISS out of an extensive pool of hundreds of items to avoid content that was biased or offensive and on the basis of item response characteristics. The CISS has 200 interest items. A unique feature of the CISS interest items for occupations is that each occupation is defined. For example, the item for architect reads, “An architect, designing new homes and buildings.” [Page 1420]The key strength of the CISS is that it also has 120 skill items that measure individuals' beliefs about their abilities to perform a range of activities. The skill items are designed to be measures of self-confidence in abilities rather than direct measures of skills. Research data reported in the manual indicate that individuals' self-rated skills and behavioral observations of their skills are highly correlated.

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