The Strong Interest Inventory - Essay Example

?The Strong Interest Inventory (SII) By: ID Email address Location The Strong Interest Inventory (SII) Introduction The strong interest test inventory is an interest inventory used in the assessment of career of interest of the examinee. It gives the information on a person thus reducing the level of difficulty in deciding the career or vocational based on the scores. The strong interest inventory invented initially in 1927 as a tool for aiding or assisting people exiting from military to have a choice of alternative occupation or career, by a psychologist E. K Strong Jr. Several revisions and modifications have come up for this assessment tool to come up with the most modern version of 2004 whose mode of operation and assessment is based on the typology (Blackwell and Case, 2008). This version is meant for the assessment of high school and college students and even adults and is best used among people of 9th grade and above. Therefore, the purpose of the SII is to measure interest in a broad range of professions, work actions, relaxation activities, and school subjects making it an assessment instrument that reflects current patterns of constant change in the world of work (CPP, 2002) Subtests Subtests are standardized procedures are used as parameters for measuring or evaluating sensitivity, memory, intelligence, aptitude or personality. These are these used before or after the SII to determine the ability of the ability or inability of the subject to do a particular task or reach a particular level of requirement. They include the Personality scales or indexes measure personality type, behavioral tendencies, or mental health (Fouad and Tang, 2001). The standards of measurements are way of establishing the examinee’s current knowledge and skill, mental aptitude and even achievements. Characteristics of the SII and selection of examinees SII has a format that is simple and easy to administer and easy to for the examinee to use. It is, firstly, color coded for ease of identification of the various fields. The assessment has 291 items examined in six areas: 107 areas of occupation, 46 subject areas, 85 activities, 28 areas of leisure activities, 16 areas of people and 9 areas of personal characteristics of the examinee (Holland codes). The first 282 areas are answered by the examinee using either of the words: strongly like, like, indifferent, dislike and strongly dislike, while the nine other areas about the personal traits of the examinee are responded to using the words; strongly like me, like me, don’t know unlike me or strongly unlike me. Administration is done by a psychologist, a counselor or a personnel worker and does not require specialized training. Tests are available in Spanish, French Canadian, and Hebrew translations and wording have been adapted for use in Great Britain (MMY, 2000). The manual and user's guide should be mastered to make maximum use of the information to be gained from the SII (MMY, 2000). The examinees are mostly adults, college students and high school students who only have to know how to read and write (Blackwell and Case, 2008). Scoring The test takes approximately between twenty five to forty five minutes and is done by filling using a pencil on a separate machine scored answer sheets and instant response can be obtained through the computer scoring system. From the database, the examinee is able to view personal interests and compare with the same interests who have the same careers, activities and likings. The results will include a variety of combinations depending on the examinee’s interest. Scores at the level of interest on each of the six areas of assessment (Holland code) will show the general occupational themes (GOP). Scores on 30 Basic Interest Scales may reveal an interest in the fields of art, science, and public speaking; Scores on 244 Occupational Scales indicate the similarity between the respondent's interests and those of people working in each of the 122 occupations; Scores on 5 Personal Style Scales learning, working, leadership, risk-taking and team orientation while Scores on the 3 administrative Scales used to identify test errors or unusual profiles are also checked. The Administrative Indexes reflect the response percentages for each of the eight sections of the inventory (Hood & Johnson, 1997). The GOT and the Basic Interest scales are homogeneous scales ensuring that all of the items for each scale represent a single type of interest. Each of the six GOT scales contains items selected to fit Holland's descriptions of the six types of occupational personalities. All 25 Basic Interest scales function as subscales for the GOT scales. The GOT and the Basic Interest scales have been standardized by the use of T-scores so that the general reference sample of 9,484 men and 9,467 women will obtain a mean of 50 and a standard deviation of 10. Separate sex norms are needed because of the large sex differences shown in the preferences for the SII Items (Hood & Johnson, 1997). High scores on GOT and on Basic Interest scales are based on "like" responses, and low scores are based on "dislike" responses. A large number of "likes" indicates broad interests and large number of "dislikes" indicates fairly focused interests. Interest scores should be interpreted in relationship to one another (Hood & Johnson, 1997). The GOT scores are also used to arrive at a Holland code to summarize the person's interests. Norms The GOT and Basic Interest scales have been normed on general reference samples of 9,484 men and 9,467 women (Fouad & Tang, 2001). Occupational scales have been normed on criterion groups as describe above in "Scoring". The majority of the Occupational groups contained 200 or more members, but ranged in size from 175 to 1,187. It is impressive that in 1981, sampling of occupations was an immense project that involved 40,197 individuals in 162 occupations, which more than satisfied the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (MMY, 2000). In addition, the 1985 update expanded further, testing 142,610 people to get 48,238 sample members. The most recent 1994 version of the SII increased the size of the general reference samples of the 1985 version from 300 to nearly 10,000 each for men and women (Hood & Johnson, 1997). Fouad & Tang (2001) say that the 1994 SII has several major advantages for rehabilitation counselors including the large general reference sample of nearly 20,000 individuals that minimizes the chance of errors. It is the first time information about ethnic or racial group membership of respondents was collected. The information that there are few meaningful differences in vocational interests related to racial and ethnic group differences is helpful to counselors using the SII with various groups. Reliability and validity The reliability of SII has been evaluated through test-retest modal ratios and has been proven to have very reliable results. For instance, the GOT test-retest medial ratios correlate between 0.74 to 0.92; the basic interest scale ranged from 0.66 to 0.93 while the occupational scale range from 0.84 to 0.90 and these correlations, calculated in three years, have been found to beat 0.87 showing a very high reliability The GOT and the Basic Interest scales have content validity because of item selection procedure (Fouad & Tang, 2001) also each type of scale has concurrent validity, such that people in an occupation score higher on their own scales than other people do (Fouad & Tang, 2001). Compared to other instruments, the SII has high predictive validity. 50% to 75% of people tested entered the occupations predicted by their profiles (Fouad & Tang, 2001). Construct validity of the GOT is grounded in the theme interrelations that fall in line with Holland's hexagonal model. The strongest correlations occur between adjacent themes and the weak correlations occur between opposites. Also, construct validity for GOT is supported by the correlations between them and the same named scales on the Vocational Preference Inventory (median = .765) (MMY, 2000). The content, concurrent, predictive and construct types of validity combine for the SII, making its use well validated for the purposes for which it is intended (MMY, 2000). Test publisher The author of the Strong Interest Inventory was E.K. Strong, Jr. Strong published his first version, the Strong Vocational Interest Blank, in 1927 (Drummond, 2000). The Strong Interest Inventory is distributed by: Consulting psychologist Press, Incorporated (CPP), 3803 East Bayshore Road, P.O. Box 10096, Recommendation The most important properties of SII as an assessment is its reliability, fairness, validity, time and cost saving ease of administration (Blackwell and Case, 2008). Therefore, it is a suitable tool for vocational assessment in the field psychology and counselling. References Blackwell, T., & Case, J. 2008). Strong Interest Inventory. Rehabilitation Counselling Bulletin, 51 (2), 122-126. Borgen, Fred & Grutter, Judith (1995). Where do I go next? Using your strong results to manage your career. Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press, Inc. Consulting Psychologists Press, Inc. (2000). Strong interest inventory®. Retrieved on February 13, 2002, from http://www.cpp-db.com/products/strong/index.asp, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Fouad, Nadya A. & Tang, Mei. (2001). Vocational Inventories. In Brian F. Bolton (Ed.) Handbook of measurement and evaluation in rehabilitation, 3rd ed. Gaithersbury, MD: Aspen Publishers, Inc. Hood, A.B. & Johnson, R.W. (1997). Assessment in counseling: A guide to the use of psychological assessment procedures. Pp. 151-85. Alexandria, VA: American Counseling Association. Read More