Abstract:
The Career Interest Inventory is a career-guidance instrument designed to assist students in making educational and vocational plans. It provides information about students' educational goals, interest in various school subjects and activities, and interest in fields of work. This information about students' interests can then be linked with information about occupations. Respondents read a list of 152 statements such as "Join a computer club" or "Plan and set goals for a company" and assign one of five rankings ranging from "like very much" to "dislike a great deal" to each statement. The inventory comes in two levels and is appropriate for college and non-college bound students as well as at-risk students. Test time is approximately 40 minutes and answer forms are machine scorable. Before taking the Inventory, students prepare by answering unscored, open-ended questions about their interests and values. Scoring is done by hand or machine by the test administrator, and results are expressed as lists of occupational groups and school subjects that the respondent likes very much. Because interests are not objectively verifiable, no reliability or validity estimates are possible for this sort of instrument.