Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

1980, Vol. 39, No. 6, 1191-1200

Some Diagnostic Scales for Research in Decision Making

and Personality: Identity, Information, and Barriers
John L. Holland, Denise C. Gottfredson, and Paul G. Power
Johns Hopkins University
A two-page form was developed to operationalize a diagnostic scheme for research and career counseling. The form contains three scales: Vocational
Identity, (the need for) Occupational Information, and Barriers (personal
limits or environmental problems). The scales were developed using a sample
of 496 high school sophomores and were validated using a new sample of 824
high school students, college students, and workers. Scale reliabilities (K-R 20s)
ranged from .23 (Barriers scale, 4 items) to .89 (Vocational Identity scale, 23
items). Construct validity of scales was supported by external ratings, factor
analysis, item content, item process analysis, correlational analysis, and earlier
research. Some uses of these scales in career development and personality research are suggested.

Speculations about identity (Erikson, 1959;

Galinsky & Fast, 1966) appear to have much
potential for understanding the processes of
personality development and the crises of
vocational life. For example, Erikson's theorizing about the formation of identity appears
to explain and integrate many hypotheses and
findings about career decision making (Holland & Holland, 1977). Unfortunately, Erikson's speculations have been neglected because
empirical measures of identity status require
considerable assessment effort (Marcia, 1967)
or are not generally available (Greenberger,
Josselson, Knerr, & Knerr, 1975).
The purpose of this article is to present a
diagnostic scheme for career decision making
that uses identity as one of three explanatory

We are indebted to the following people for their

assistance in collecting and processing the data and in
formulating and testing some of the hypotheses:
Harry Adler, Curtis Ahrendsen, Scott Baugher, Robert
J. Crowley, Frank Cutrone, Sister Marie deChantal,
Stephen De Sesa, Andrea Doering, Michael Federico,
Philip Federico, Kenneth Feinberg, Mark Greenberg,
John Johnson, Duane LeVine, Richard Levy, Randall
Mayne, Robert Meirowitz, James M. Richards, Lee
Richmond, Lance Schneck, Robert Smither, Steven
Wey.
Requests for reprints should be sent to John L.
Holland, Department of Social Relations, The Johns
Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland 21218.

constructs. This scheme assumes that the

majority of difficulties in career decision making fall into one or more of the following categories: (a) problems of vocational identity,
(b) lack of information or training, (c) environmental or personal barriers, or (d) no
problem. Vocational identity means the possession of a clear and stable picture of one's
goals, interests, and talents. These characteristics lead to relatively untroubled decision
making and confidence in one's ability to make
good decisions in the face of some inevitable
environmental ambiguities.
A simple hand-scored form has been developed to implement the diagnostic scheme
for use in clinical work or research. The form
can be scored without a stencil and is arranged
so that it can be quickly interpreted byclinicians. The 23-item Identity scale can also
be incorporated in assessment materials for
research purposes. Table 1 shows a portion of
the form.
Development
The diagnostic scheme has its origins in
three streams of research: the older counseling
diagnostic schemes, the indecision literature,
and the experimental studies of the effects of
interest inventories, workshops, and career
programs on clients.

Copyright 1980 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0022-3514/80/3906-1191$00.75

1191

1192

J. HOLLAND, D. GOTTFREDSON, AND P. POWER

Table 1

Sample Items From the Identity, Information, and Barrier Scales

Identity scale
I don't know what my major strengths and weaknesses are.
Making up my mind about a career has been a long and difficult problem for me.
I am uncertain about the occupation I would enjoy.
My estimates of my abilities and talents vary a lot from year to year.
Information scale
I need the following information:
How to find a job in my chosen career.
What kinds of people enter different occupations.
More information about employment opportunities.
How to get the necessary training in my chosen career.
Barriers scale
I am uncertain about my ability to finish the necessary education or training.
I don't have the money to follow the career I want most.
I lack the special talents to follow my first choice.
An influential person in my life does not approve of my vocational choice.

The four categories in the present scheme

resemble many of the categories in the diagnostic schemes proposed earlier for personal
and vocational counseling by Berezin (1957),
Bordin (1946), Byrne (1958), Pepinsky (1948),
Robinson (1963), and Williamson (1939).
Crites (1969) has provided a helpful review
and critique of these schemes and has proposed
still another diagnostic scheme.
The present diagnostic scheme was devised
to reduce the difficulties inherent in the older
schemes. The main categorical difference
between the new and old schemes is that we
have assigned intrapsychic problems to a
single category of vocational identity. The
assumption made earlier that counselors can
reliably distinguish different patterns and
degrees of maladjustment does not appear to
be warranted. With one exception (Berezin,
1957), the tests of the older schemes suggest
that such distinctions have a low degree of
reliability. The remaining categories in the
present scheme have some clear parallels with
the older schemes.
The search for the correlates of indecision,
summarized most recently by Holland and
Holland (1977), yielded two promising scales
for assessing a person's vocational identity
and vocational decision-making difficulties.
The elaboration and revision of these scales led
to the three scales in Table 1, which serve to
operationalize the present diagnostic scheme.

The experimental studies of the influence

of interest inventories, card sorts, and workshops suggested some useful links between
client characteristics and treatments. Power,
Holland, Daiger, and Takai (1979) discovered
that high school boys and girls with high
identity scores and few decision-making difficulties rated the value of the self-directed
search higher than boys and girls with low
identity scores and many decision-making
difficulties. In a related experiment, Schenk
(1976) found that college students with flat
and inconsistent Vocational Preference Inventory profiles benefited most from a threesession vocational workshop, and that students
with well-defined and consistent profiles
benefited the least. In addition, Differentiation
scores were positively but weakly related to
the Identity scores. These and other results
imply that people with different personal
characteristics need different treatments.

Scale Development
The development of the diagnostic scales
was a lengthy and circuitous process. The three
scales in Table 1 were derived from two earlier
scales: the Vocational Decision-Making Difficulty scale (VDMD) and the Identity scale
(ID). The VDMD scale grew out of a questionnaire item that asked respondents to
indicate one or more reasons for their indecision

SOME DIAGNOSTIC SCALES

or dissatisfaction with a current vocational

aspiration. The ID scale was an elaboration
of the Identity scale proposed earlier by
Greenberger and Sorensen (1974) and Greenberger et al. (1975).
The first use of the Identity scale indicated
that it had moderate reliability and validity
(Holland & Holland, 1977). It distinguished
decided and undecided high school and college
students as well as any other variable, and it
correlated with well-established scales in
expected directions. The Identity scale had
moderate and positive correlations with the
Interpersonal Competency (Holland & Holland, 1977) and Vocational Attitude scales
(Crites, 1973), and moderate and negative
correlations with the Anomie scale (Holland
& Holland, 1977). In addition, the VDMD
(Holland & Holland, 1977) scale exhibited an
intelligible pattern of correlations with these
same variables within small samples of undecided high school and college students and
adults.
We also noticed that the ID and VDMD
scales might actually be the same scale stated
in different kinds of contents. This suspicion
was confirmed when Power et al. (1979) discovered that these scales correlated .52
and .53 for high school samples of 203 boys
and 322 girls. The scale reliabilities were in
the .70s and low .80s.
The next step was to lengthen the ID and
VDMD scales to increase their reliability. This
was achieved by reviewing the old scales and
examining similar scales (cf. Osipow, Carney,
& Barak, 1976). The Identity and VDMD
scales were lengthened from 15 to 20 and from
12 to 41 items, respectively.
The two scales were included in a brief
questionnaire along with a short form of the
Interpersonal Competency scale (Holland &
Baird, 1968) developed by DeVries and Wu
(Note 1). This 7-item scale was added for two
purposes: (a) To see if its items might be useful
additions to the Identity scale, and (b) to
locate items that were unrelated to personal
competence or identity.
The items in the VDMD and ID scales were
also organized by two judges into subscales
that were assumed to assess the main dimensions of Identity (stability of self, clarity of
self, knowledge of compatible interactions,

1193

sophisticated career outlook) and VDMD

(need for occupational information, barriers,
and limits; need for ability information; conflict about or need for more occupational options; decision-making difficulties and doubts;
and naive career outlook).
The questionnaire containing these scales
was then administered to new samples of high
school sophomores (345 girls and 232 boys),
whose average age was 15. Students also took
the Self-Directed Search (SDS; Holland, 1979)
after completing the questionnaire. The SDS
was used to link the current scales and diagnostic ideas to the diagnostic scheme proposed
earlier by Holland, Gottfredson, and Nafziger
(1975).
Multiple-item analyses were performed. A
standard item - total-score analysis was performed to locate the best items without regard
to subscale and to confirm that many environmental barriers and personal limits items would
be relatively uncorrelated with the ID or
VDMD scales. All items were also correlated
with all subscales to see if they were properly
placed. (They all seemed to be.) The items in
the Identity and VDMD scales correlated more
with their respective scales than with the
Interpersonal Competency (1C) scale (Holland
& Baird, 1968). Likewise, the 1C items had
only low correlations with the ID and VDMD
scales.
The old and new forms of the VDMD scale
correlate .86 for boys and .85 for girls. The
revised ID and VDMD scales are more highly
correlated than the earlier forms of these
scales, .66 and .67 for boys and girls,
respectively. The matrices of subscales for the
ID and VDMD scales (not shown here) are
without exception positively correlated with all
subscales and their respective total scales. And,
with one exception, the subscales of the ID and
VDMD scales are always negatively correlated
with one another. These correlational patterns
suggest that these scales may be the opposite
poles of the same dimension and that their a
priori subscales are also not independent
dimensions.
A principal-components factor analysis was
performed to test this belief. The varimax rotated factor matrix shown in Table 2 produced
a clear two-factor solution for boys and girls.

J. HOLLAND, D. GOTTFREDSON, AND P. POWER

1194
Table 2

Rotated Factor Loadings of the VDMD and ID Subscales for Boys and Girls
Boys

Girls

Scale
VDMD subscale
Occupational Information
Barriers and Limits
Ability Information
Occupational Options
Decision-Making Difficulties
Naive Outlook

.368
.352
.438
.673
.769
.160

.551
.279
.331
.395
.272
.429

.151
.496
.617
.612
.600
.032

Identity subscale
Compatible Interactions
Stable Self
Clarity Self
Sophisticated Outlook

-.337
-.551
-.474
-.170

- 043
-.316
-.217
-.784

- 602
-.729
-.719
-.210

-.018
-.093
-.119
-.744

Percentage of variance

38.8

11.1

38.8

12.2

.774
.111
.301
.464
.522
.701

Note. VDMD = Vocational Decision-Making Difficulty scale, ID = Identity scale.

The application of the Wrigley and Neuhaus

factor similarity index (Harman, 1967) to these
data indicated an explicit matching of factors
for boys and girls. The index for Factor 1 was
.946, and the index for Factor 2 was .935. The
index for Factor 1 (girls) versus Factor 2
(boys) was .684, and that for Factor 2 (girls)
versus Factor 1 (boys) was .658. The Vocational Identity (VI) and VDMD scales clearly
have the same factor structure and are measuring similar dimensions for both sexes.
Factors 1 and 2 in Table 2 were used to
guide the development of the Vocational
Identity scale and the Occupational Information scale. In addition, any item that correlated .35 or less with the VDMD or ID scale
was omitted. The item - total-scale correlations in these scales ranged from .35 to .67 for
boys and from .35 to .64 for girls. The Barrier
scale was formed by using items whose content appeared to be a sign of an environmental
barrier or a clear psychological limitation. To
be included in this scale, items had to have a
low or negligible correlation with the VDMD
or ID scales and for both sexes. These correlations ranged from .08 to .36 for boys and from
.12 to .27 for girls.
The scoring direction was revised for four
items by rewording. This was done to simplify
the scoring. The VI scale is scored as the total
number of false answers, so a high score means

a clear sense of identity and a low score means

a diffuse sense of identity.
Reliability
The K-R 20s for the three scales are presented in Table 3 for the samples that were
used to devise the scales and for an accidental
sample of college students and workers who
were given the My Vocational Situation (MVS;
Holland et al., 1980) scale as a part of the validation process. The VI scale has a high degree of
internal consistency for all samples. The 01
and B scales have a relatively low degree of
internal consistencyespecially in the sample
of high school students. The diverse content
and low reliability of the Occupational Information (OI) and Barriers (B) scales indicate
that they resemble checklists more than scales.
Construct Validity
The construct validity of the MVS scales lies
in the origins of the items, the scale development, and the following analyses that were
performed to test multiple hypotheses about
the relation of vocational identity to age, educational level, vocational aspirations, external
ratings, and other criteria.
To test these hypotheses, the authors, some
colleagues, and 14 undergraduates administered the MVS to 824 persons in high schools,

SOME DIAGNOSTIC SCALES

1195

Table 3
Scale Reliabilities (K-R 20s) for Samples of High School Students, College Students, and Workers
Males
Scale

K-R 20

Vocational Identity
Occupational Information
Barriers

.86
.39
.23

Vocational Identity
Occupational Information
Barriers

.89
.79
.45

Females

SD

High school students

5.46
11.20
185
3.65
1.17
185
2.03
185
1.21

College students and

16.54
2.63
3.35

5.32
1.43
.86

K-R 20

SD

.86
.44
.23

11.27
3.67
1.82

5.39
1.10
1.13

311
311
311

.88
.77
.65

14.86
2.01
3.16

5.36
1.47
1.06

301
300
300

workers

291
289
288

Note. The ns are less than the number of people surveyed due to incompletely filled out questionnaires.

colleges, and businesses. No attempt was made

to obtain well-defined samples. We wanted
instead to obtain a sample with a great range
in age, kind of work, and level of training. The
total sample ranged in age from 16 to 69. The
average ages were 25.4 and 23.0 years for males
and females, respectively. Educational level
ranged from high school freshmen through the
PhD in engineering and the social sciences.
The sample contained factory workers, office
workers, scientists, personnel workers, and
others. A small subsample (n = 245) was rated
by student experimenters who used a five-step
rating scale (strongly agree = 5, agree = 4,
don't know = 3, disagree = 2, strongly disagree = 1) to rate the subject on the following
attributes: (a) This person appears to be wellorganized, (b) this person appears to be at
loose ends, (c) this person seems self-confident,
(d) this person seems tense and uncomfortable,
and (e) this person seems competent to handle
his or her life well.
The correlations between the MVS scales
and age, number and variety of occupational
aspirations, and external ratings are presented
in Table 4 for groups of males and females who
had taken the MVS. Data for females are
above the diagonal for a change.
Table 4 indicates that the VI, 01, and B
scales had small to moderate correlations with
age. We hypothesized that the Identity and
Occupational Information scales should be
positively correlated with age, which was the
case.

The VI, 01, and B scales were expected to

be negatively correlated with the variety and
number of vocational aspirations a person lists
in the MVS. Variety was assessed by counting
the number of different types of occupations
named, using Holland's six main occupational
classes to categorize aspirations, so scores
range from 1 to 6. Of the three scales, the VI
was expected to be most negatively correlated
with vocational aspirations. This was not the
case; the VI and 01 scales correlated with
vocational aspirations to about the same degree, and the B scale had only negligible
correlations.
These results suggest that males and females with a clear sense of identity and
with a small number of informational needs
have a small number and variety of occupational aspirations.
The external ratings in Table 4 were expected to correlate only with the VI scale and
in the following directions. High VI scorers
were hypothesized to be well-organized, not at
loose ends; self-confident, not tense or uncomfortable; and competent to handle their
lives well. The correlations between the VI
scale and ratings for males and females followed
this pattern. Only the rating of "appears tense
and uncomfortable" was unrelated to the VI
scale.
The ratings displayed the usual halo effect.
Their absolute intercorrelations averaged .49.
At the same time, the ratings for males were
most strongly related to the VI, 01, and B

CT-

Table 4
Intercorrelations Among My Vocational Situation (MVS) Scales, Ratings, Occupational Alternatives, and Age
Item
1. Age

n
MVS scale
2. Number of Occup."
n
3. Variety of Occup.b
n
4. Vocational Identity
n

5. Occupational Information
n

6. Barriers
n

Rating category
7. "Well organized"

8. "At loose ends"

n

9. "Self-confident"
n

1.

-.26**
229
-.22**
229
.28**
287
.32**
285
.19**
284
.24*

90

11. "Competent to handle life well"

n

-.03

-.17

87

87

-.11

87
87
.12

.06
300

.15**

299

.50**
90
-.41**
90

.08

87

5.

-.01

299

.39**
88
-.33**
88

.36**
89
-.31**
89

.31**

88

.25*

89

-.08

-.04

-.14

-.15

70

72

70

71

87

.42**

-.06

87

90

-.12

115

-.23*

.07

7.

-.21**
-.04
-.11
255
255
110
-.18** -.11
-.28**
255
255
110
.51**
.43**
.26**
300
115
300

.38**
.14
300
115
.39**
.11

287
115

.31**

90

6.

70

-.05

90

.09

87
.20

-.06

72

4.

.67** -.13*

256
256

.59**
-.16**
231
256

-.16*
-.23**
231
231
-.25** -.17**
.60**
229
229
289
-.09
-.13*
.55**
230
288
230

-.16

90

3.

-.19** -.15*
255
255

90

10. "Tense and uncomfortable"

n

2.

.29**
88

.37**

89

8.
-.11

115

9.
-.03

110

-.12

-.02

.06

-.12

110
85
110
-.25**
.28** -.11
115
89
115
-.20*

115

-.03

.01

-.13

115

-.05

89

115
115

.51**
-.81**
115
115

-.75**
-.45**
90
115
.54** -.51**
90
90
-.30**
.51**
-.49**
72
72
72
.63** -.48**
.56**
90
90
90

.03

89

11.
-.09

116

85

110
.23*

.23*

89

115
.07

10.

-.20*

111
-.27**
111
.32**
116
.14
116
.03
116

-.27**
.48**
89
115
-.47**
.21*
115
89
.47**
-.52**
115
89
-.34**
89

-.41**
72

Note. Correlations for females are above the diagonal; those for males are below the diagonal.
* The number of occupations or alternatives a person is considering.
The variety of occupations or alternatives a person is considering, or the number of different occupational categories according to Holland's classification,
so that scores can range from 1 to 6 (Holland, 1973).
*p <.05. **p <.01.

za
d
Q
O
H
H
Tl

W
d
c
O
21
>
d

!*
*a
O
M

SOME DIAGNOSTIC SCALES

scales and usually in that order. In short,

naive raters saw males with high Identity and
low Information and Barrier scores as wellorganized, not at loose ends, self-confident,
and competent to handle their lives well. For
females, desirable ratings were correlated most
with the VI scale and the variety of occupation
and aspirations. External ratings had only one
significant correlation with the OI or B scales.
A short form of the Vocational Identity
scale (9 items) was also included in a survey
of 2,343 high school students sponsored by the
Evening College of our university. This sample
included students in grades 9 to 12 ranging in
age from 14 to 23 years (M = 17 years) and
was drawn from six rural and urban counties.
The questionnaire was concerned mainly
with vocational education. The VI scale was
correlated with the number of concerns a
student checked, such as, "Would you like help
with your: (a) personal relationships with
friends, (b) school courses and grades, (c)
family situations and problems, (d) rules and
regulations, (e) feelings about yourself, (f)
physical appearance, (g) other
"
We hypothesized that the VI scale would be
negatively correlated with the number of concerns a student checked. A poor sense of
identity would be expected to affect vocational

1197

and nonvocational tasks, and our clinical experience suggested that the VI scale might
also be a general adjustment scale.
The correlations between the VI scale and
amount of help desired were .23 for females
(n = 933) and -.29 for males ( = 1,410).
Both of these correlations were significant
(p < .001). In addition, each of the individual
items of concern expressed by students was
correlated with the Identity score. Individual
concerns generally had low but significant correlations with the VI scale. For females, the
three highest correlations were "feelings about
yourself" (-.17), "college selection" (-.17),
and "rules & regulations" (.15). For males,
the three highest correlations were "feelings
about yourself" (.23), "family situations &
problems" (.22), and "physical appearance"
(.21). In short, high VI scores were negatively associated with expressed need for help
in diverse areas of concern.
The data for the OI and B scales were also
analyzed according to level of education, occupational status, and type of vocational interest
or work. Table 5 presents the means and
standard deviations for these scales for high
school and college students, full-time workers,
and graduate students and faculty in engineering and social science.

Table 5
Normative Data for My Vocational Situation Scale
Males

SD

185
185
185

11.27
3.67
1.82

5.39
1.10
1.13

311
311
311

5.20
1.52
.83

132
132
132

14.34
1.77
3.22

5.34
1.42
.94

135
134
134

17.03
2.87
3.37

5.51
1.35
.90

140
138
138

15.34
2.24
3.10

5.26
1.51
1.18

143
143
143

19.13
2.80
3.36

2.42
1.21
.93

15
15
14

17.71
2.36
3.57

2.76

14
14
14

SD

High school students

Vocational Identity
Occupational Information
Barriers

11.20
3.65
2.03

5.46
1.17
1.21

College students
Vocational Identity
Occupational Information
Barriers

15.86
2.39
3.35

Full-time workers
Vocational Identity
Occupational Information
Barriers
Graduate students and faculty
Vocational Identity
Occupational Information
Barriers

Group/scale

Females

1.28
.85

1198

J. HOLLAND, D. GOTTFREDSON, AND P. POWER

Scores on the VI scale clearly increased with

age, training, and degree of specialization. The
OI and B scales varied with age in more complex ways, but the haphazard sampling makes
any conclusion premature. Table 5 will probably be most useful for establishing some rough
definitions of high, medium, and low scores for
people of different ages.
The next analysis (not presented here) was
performed to examine the relation of scale
scores to type of interest, as assessed by
student aspirations, or by kind of work, if a
person was employed full time.
These results showed that the MVS scales
are related more to type of interest than to age.
This outcome was not unexpected, but no explicit prediction was made other than that
people with realistic and conventional interests
would probably have the lowest mean scores
on the VI scale. Earlier research (Holland et al.,
1975) had shown that these two scales were
negatively correlated with all scales of the
Career Maturity Inventory (Crites, 1973). The
formulations for the types (Holland, 1973) also
imply that the Social type would be most insightful and socially competent and that the
Conventional and Realistic types would be the
least socially competent.
Finally, two two-person teams interviewed
a total of 100 college students (SO males, 50
females) and inquired about their thinking in
responding true or false to the items in the
MVS. These brief inquiries were performed to
learn if the items were interpreted according
to their content or if the items were subject
to diverse interpretations and distortions. In
general, explanations or rationalizations of responses indicated that students usually respond directly to the content of an item, and
a single item usually produced only one to
three common explanations.
These process analyses by naive workers
appear to be helpful in three ways. They show
that the content of the items usually stimulates
responses that are clearly related to the intent
of the items. A few case histories by one
student team also indicated that item responses
are probably related to family traditions and
pressures. Many respondents were able to
report these influences with little urging. These

informal inquiries also identified several items

that were redundant.
Discussion
The evidence for the construct validity of
the Vocational Identity scale is substantial:
The original items come from large national
samples of high school and college students
who "explained" their indecision in both freeresponse and multiple-choice formats (Holland,
Note 2, Note 3). The correlates of the two
scales (ID and VDMD) that were combined
to form the Vocational Identity scale imply
that high scorers are decided, mature, selfconfident, and not anomic (Holland et al.,
1975; Holland & Holland, 1977). In the present
study, the relation of the VI scale to external
ratings, age, interests, and educational level
appears to be consistent with our formulation
for what the VI scale measures. The VI, OI,
and B scales form a diagnostic scheme that
appears to be a derivative of the schemes
developed much earlier (Crites, 1969). Finally,
the antecedent scales (ID and VDMD) are
related to vocational treatment outcomes in
the predicted way (Power, Holland, & Daiger,
1979). High school girls with a clear sense of
identity and few decision-making problems
evaluate an interest inventory more positively
than do girls with a diffuse sense of identity
and many problems.
The most closely related forerunner of the
VI scale is the Placement Readiness (PRS)
scale developed by Stevens (1962) and validated by Schneider and Stevens (1971) and
Stevens (1973). The PRS scale is a 10-dimensional, 5-point scale that an interviewer uses
to rate a client's readiness for placement.
Stevens' (1973) descriptions of college students
at three levels of readiness are reminiscent of
people at three levels of the VI scale:
The characteristics of high placement readiness are
self-actualized, independent behavior with crystallization and specificity of job goals; whereas, the characteristics of low placement readiness are passive, dependent
behavior with vaguely denned goals. The characteristics
of moderate placement readiness are a mixture of
behavior exhibited in each of the other two patterns
with a tendency toward exploration, (p. 217)

SOME DIAGNOSTIC SCALES

1199

More important, the PRS was validated by Bordin, E. S. Diagnosis in counseling and psychotherapy. Educational and Psychological Measurement,
using the Placement Success scale to rate the
1946, 6, 169-184.
quality of a placement and the time that it Byrne, R. H. Proposed revisions of the Bordin-Pepinsky
took. Using conventional personality invendiagnostic constructs. Journal of Counseling Psytories, high (as opposed to low) placement
chology, 1958, 5, 184-187.
readiness was moderately and significantly re- Crites, J. O. Vocational psychology. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969.
lated to dominance, toughmindedness, and
Crites,
J. O. Theory and research handbook for the
nonneuroticism.
Career Maturity Inventory. Monterey, Calif.: CaliThe Occupational Information and Barriers
fornia Test Bureau/McGraw-Hill, 1973.
scales should be regarded as useful checklists Erikson, E. H. Identity and the life cycle. Psychological
or borderline scales. They do not always funcIssues, 1959, /, 1-171.
tion as homogeneous scales, but our clinical Galinsky, M. D., & Fast, I. Vocational choice as a
focus of the identity search. Journal of Counseling
experience indicates that these lists are helpful
Psychology, 1966,13, 89-92.
for identifying specific needs and problems Greenberger, E., Josselson, R., Knerr, C., & Knerr, B.
that are often neglected or go unrecognized.
The measurement and structure of psychosocial
The Identity, Information, and Barriers
maturity. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 1975, 4,
127-143.
scales have multiple applications in career development and personality research. The Iden- Greenberger, E., & Sorensen, A. B. Toward a concept
of psychosocial maturity. Journal of Youth and Adotity scale provides a simple operational definilescence, 1974, 3, 229-258.
tion for facilitating the examination of Erik- Harman, H. H. Modern factor analysis (2nd ed.).
son's formulations at different ages: the relaChicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967.
tion of identity to other well-validated per- Holland, J. L. Making vocational choices. Englewood
Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973.
sonality variables, the origins of identity as
assessed by case histories, and so on. In related Holland, J. L. Professional manual for the Self-Directed
Search. Palo Alto, California: Consulting Psyresearch, we would expect identity scores to be
chologists Press, 1979.
positively associated with career stability in Holland, J. L., &, Baird, L. L. An interpersonal comthe same way that a small number of vocapetency scale. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 1968, 28, 503-510.
tional aspirations were related to a clear sense
of identity in the present study. Finally, iden- Holland, J. L., Daiger, D. C., & Power, P. G. My vocational situation. Palo Alto, Calif.: Consulting Psytity appears to be an unusually apt construct
chologists Press, 1980.
for increasing the linkage between vocational Holland, J. L., Gottfredson, G. D,, & Nafziger, D. H.
psychology and personality.
Testing the validity of some theoretical signs of
Reference Notes
1. DeVries, D. L., & Wu, S. C. An evaluation of an
interpersonal competency scale. Unpublished manuscript, 1971. (Available from the Center for Creative
Leadership, P.O. Box P-l, Greensboro, North
Carolina 27402.)
2. Holland, J. L. National Merit Student Survey (196Z).
Chicago: National Merit Scholarship Corp., 1962.
3. Holland, J. L. A descriptive study of two-year college
students. Unpublished manuscript, 1969. (Available
from the author, Department of Social Relations,
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland
21218.)

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J. HOLLAND, D. GOTTFREDSON, AND P. POWER

Schenk, G. E. Influence of a career group experience on

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Received November 15, 1979

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