Kuder Occupational Interest Survey

The Kuder Occupational Interest Survey (KOIS; published by National Career Assessment Services) is a self-report measure of vocational interests designed to inform the educational and vocational planning and decision making of individuals in education, rehabilitation, industry, and private practice settings. The current KOIS, Form DD, evolved from continuous research and revision that began in the 1930s under the direction of Frederic Kuder.

The KOIS is appropriate for use with individuals who are high school age and older. The inventory can be administered in individual or group settings; self-administration is possible, but availability of a counselor is recommended for nuanced interpretation of scores. The items consist of 100 forced-choice triads, each requiring respondents to indicate which of three activities they prefer most and which they prefer least. The pattern of item responses is used to compute scores for scales presented in four sections of the KOIS report form: Dependability, Vocational Interest Estimates (VIEs), Occupations, and College Majors.

The first section of the KOIS report form provides a statement of the dependability of inventory results for the respondent according to indices that assess the typicality of the individual's responses. The second section of the report form presents scores for 10 VIEs, representing the following areas of vocational interests: Outdoor, Mechanical, Scientific, Computational, Persuasive, Artistic, Literary, Musical, Social Service, and Clerical. Two sets of VIE scores are provided in descending rank order, one based on female norms and one on male norms.

The third and fourth sections of the KOIS report form present scores for 109 Occupational scales and 40 College Major scales. These scores are computed using Clemens's lambda coefficient and represent the correlation between the individual's item responses and the modal responses provided by criterion groups of satisfied women and/or men representing a specific occupation or college major. The Occupational and College Major scales also are presented in rank order (as opposed to being grouped according to some classification scheme) because the KOIS emphasizes specific information about individual occupations and majors rather than information about average relationships existing in groups. Scores within .06 lambda points of a respondent's highest score are labeled “most similar to” the interests of the criterion groups for those scales, those between .07 and .12 lambda points below the high score are labeled “next most similar,” and the remaining scores are listed in order of similarity. Separate sets of scores are presented using norms for women and men.

Evidence for the reliability and validity of KOIS scale scores is generally strong and is reviewed in the KOIS general manual. In keeping with the precedent Kuder set in responding to the evolving needs of inventory users, a new instrument, the Kuder Career Search Schedule (KCSS), recently was introduced. The KCSS uses the KOIS items, but matches individual response patterns to those of a number of criterion persons (instead of criterion samples) to identify satisfied individuals whose interests are most similar to the respondent. This information is used to generate a narrative report describing the careers of the closest matching criterion persons.