The measurement of occupational interests in China

• Main Author: Xing, Shaomin
• Language: ENG
• Published: ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst 1996
• Subjects: Educational psychology|Occupational psychology|Vocational education
• Online Access: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9639053

The purpose of this research was to commence the development of a Chinese Vocational Interests Inventory (CVII) which will assist Chinese secondary school students in the identification of their vocational interests. The inventory contains 323 items which include a variety of occupational activities and titles. The occupational titles were selected from Chinese Dictionary of Occupational Titles based on the popularity of occupations in PRC and categorized into 11 subgroups which represented a majority of occupational groups. The occupational activities which related to each occupational title were generated and refined from a description of the nature and work activities of selected occupations defined by occupational specialists in Occupational Outlook Handbook published by the U.S. Labor Department (1991). Further design of the study included establishing preliminary reliability and validity of the CVII, and confirmatory factor analysis to identify occupational interests areas. The CVII was administrated to 454 Chinese secondary school students who voluntarily participated in the project. The results of this preliminary study suggested the CVII have reliability (r =.98), concurrent validity (r =.65) between expressed occupation interests and inventoried interests, and internal validity (r =.81, occupational title versus occupational activities). Principal-component analysis extracted nine factors from 11 proposed subscales of the CVII. They are labelled as Artistic, Science & Technology, Business, Artistic creativity, Scholastic, Legal, Medical, and Service. The combination of some factors is compatible with John Holland's 6 occupational categories, indicating to a certain extent universal value of career interests. Gender difference was found in both factors clusters and occupation preference in which female students favored Liberal Art, Performing Art, and other language expressing related occupations, whereas male students were strongly interested in Science, Engineering, and Mechanical type of occupations. The homogeneous scales for female students and the combined-gender students were established throughout the factor analyses. More research will be needed to develop homogeneous scales for the male students, and to collect test-retest reliability and predictive validity by using criterion groups in order to develop a menu for the CVII.