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Introduction
Vocational interests and how they change over the life span. Research examines the structure of interests, how that structure develops and changes over the life course, and the reciprocal influences among personality, interests, and abilities. Relatedly, career development in emerging adulthood, and assessment of personality traits and work values.
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January 1987 - April 2015
January 1996 - April 2015
January 1989 - December 2011
Publications
Publications (185)
Vocational interests are one of the most widely studied individual difference constructs in psychology, education, and management. Despite their widespread importance and use, scholars have yet to determine the optimal way to measure vocational interests and match people’s interests to careers. Empirical-keyed occupational scales tend to have the h...
Development of a work values measure that is linked to the O*NET.
Over the past half-century, Holland’s RIASEC model has dominated vocational interest research. Although the RIASEC categories effectively capture general occupational themes, their breadth obscures meaningful variability across underlying basic interests , which are more refined interest scales. In this research, we adapted the Comprehensive Assess...
Postmaterialist theory suggests that gender differences in vocational interests should be larger in more egalitarian countries, reflecting a counter-intuitive pattern called the “Gender-Equality Paradox.” By contrast, social role theory implies that gender differences in vocational interests should be smaller in more egalitarian countries as gender...
Measuring person–occupation fit serves many important purposes, from helping young people explore majors and careers to helping jobseekers assess fit with available jobs. However, most existing fit measures are limited in that they focus on single individual difference domains without considering how fit may differ across multiple domains. For exam...
Although research and policy efforts have attempted to “even the hiring playing field” and progress equal opportunities, systemic employment patterns based on gender and ethnicity remain prevalent. An unexplored avenue of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts is the degree to which all people can obtain jobs that fit their interests. The present...
Research on automation and the future of work is a major focus for both academics andpractitioners due to technological changes disrupting the labor market and educational pathways.Although recent articles have published projections about the types of tasks and jobs most likelyto be automated in the coming years, little attention has been devoted t...
The current research developed the Career Guidance Chatbot (CGC-bot) that collects high-quality, diverse work preference information from users, and the subsequent twenty Natural Language Processing (NLP) + Machine Learning (ML) algorithm-powered machines that predict basic interest scores from user’s chat with the CGC-bot, and searches for top O*N...
Vocational interest assessments are widely used to determine which jobs might be a good fit for people. However, showing a good fit to particular jobs does not necessarily mean that those jobs are available. In this respect, little is known about the alignment between people’s vocational interests and national labor demands. The current study used...
Life goals play a major role in shaping people’s lives and careers. Although life goals have prior documented associations with occupational and other life outcomes, no prior studies have investigated associations between life goal development and occupational outcomes. Using two representative samples of Icelandic youth (Sample 1: n = 485, Sample...
Vocational interest assessments are widely used to determine which jobs might be a good fit for people. However, showing a good fit to particular jobs does not necessarily mean that those jobs are available. In this respect, little is known about the alignment between people’s vocational interests and national labor demands. The current study used...
We developed the Occupational Values Inventory (OVI), a 30-item measure that expands the content coverage of work values by linking into a broad range of O*NET occupational descriptors, including Work Activities and Work Contexts, along with salary data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The OVI assesses 11 values—Interpersonal, Outdoor, Physical...
Objective:
Personality changes are related to successfully performing adult occupational roles which require teamwork, duty, and managing stress. However, it is unclear how personality development relates to specific job characteristics that vary across occupations.
Method:
We investigated whether 151 objective job characteristics, derived from...
Recent contributions propose to integrate a state perspective into the conceptualization of vocational interests. Such integration addresses in-the-moment expressions of interests and allows to track relations to distal outcomes of vocational interests more closely. To further the trait-state integration of vocational interests, insights into the n...
Over the past half-century, Holland’s RIASEC model has dominated vocational interest research. Although the RIASEC categories effectively capture general occupational domains, their breadth obscures meaningful variability across underlying basic interests. In this research, we adapted the Comprehensive Assessment of Basic Interests (CABIN; Su et al...
Holland’s RIASEC model is the dominant framework to conceptualize vocational interests. It describes vocational interests with six broad domains: realistic, investigative, artistic, social, enterprising, and conventional. The O*NET Interest Profiler Short Form is a freely accessible inventory measuring vocational interests according to Holland’s mo...
South Korean vocational psychologists have studied the impact of parental support on children's career self-efficacy using theories validated in the US. However, there is little research examining whether theories developed in the US can be applied to South Korean population. As the cultural context is a critical factor that can shape the associati...
Cognitive abilities and interests both play an important role in guiding knowledge acquisition, but most previous studies have examined them separately. The current study used a large and representative dataset to integrate interests and abilities using a person-centered approach that examines how distinct profiles of interests and abilities relate...
Interests have been studied from a trait- and state-perspective. Recent studies propose to integrate these two traditions. This preregistered experience-sampling study (N = 217, Nobservations = 5,631) aimed to further the development of trait-state interest models. We sought to replicate and explain that vocational interest states vary within perso...
Despite the widespread use of RIASEC interest inventories, little is known about whether these inventories actually measure the same core constructs and provide similar career recommendations to individuals. The current study investigates the construct validity among four major interest inventories—the Self-Directed Search (SDS), the O*NET Interest...
Despite the widespread use of RIASEC interest inventories, little is known about whether these inventories actually measure the same core constructs and provide similar career recommendations to individuals. This study investigates the construct validity among four major interest inventories—the Self-Directed Search (SDS), O*NET Interest Profiler (...
The present study investigated whether Black and White Americans differed on the dimensions of Holland’s RIASEC model of vocational interests. Theoretical explanations of why racial differences in interests may occur are advanced drawing on Gottfredson’s (1981) theory of circumscription and compromise, and social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1...
Despite a rapidly changing labor market, little is known about how youth’s career goals correspond to projections about the future of work. This research examined the career aspirations of 3,367 adolescents (age 13–18 years) from 42 U.S. states. We conducted a large-scale coding effort using the Occupational Information Network (O*NET) to compile t...
The current research proposes to incorporate vocational interests into the study of adverse impact (i.e., differential hiring/selection rates between minority and majority groups in employment settings). In the context of high stakes testing (e.g., using cognitive and personality tests), we show how race gaps in vocational interests would correspon...
Despite a rapidly changing labor market, little is known about how youth’s career goals correspond to projections about the future of work. This research examined the career aspirations of 3,367 adolescents (age 13-18 years) from 42 U.S. states. We conducted a large-scale coding effort using the Occupational Information Network (O*NET) to compile t...
Theory and research suggest that vocational interests should predict individual behavior at work, in school, and during leisure time. However, more research is needed to understand the underlying mechanisms for these relationships. In the present study, we suggest that satisfaction and motivation are direct outcomes of vocational interest fit and m...
The O*NET Interest Profiler is a vocational interest inventory designed for use in educational planning, career exploration, and career guidance. The Interest Profiler was introduced in 1999 as one of the U.S. Department of Labor’s (DOL) O*NET Career Exploration Tools. John Holland’s (1997) RIASEC theoretical model (Realistic-Investigative-Artistic...
Theories of person-environment (P-E) fit describe a dynamic process in which fit should improve over time due to changes in a person’s attributes, the environment, or both. Although these ideas are central in several theoretical perspectives, they have largely gone untested. Here, we report a longitudinal examination of interest congruence (i.e., i...
Theories of person-environment (P-E) fit describe a dynamic process in which fit should improve over time due to changes in a person’s attributes, the environment, or both. Although these ideas are central in several theoretical perspectives, they have largely gone untested. Here, we report a longitudinal examination of interest congruence (i.e., i...
Vocational interests are relatively stable individual differences that can change across the lifespan. However, little is known about the importance of interest changes, relative to stable interest levels, for predicting career outcomes. This study assessed the long‐term predictive power of adolescent interest levels and interest growth for five ca...
This research examined whether personality changes from adolescence to young adulthood predicted five early career outcomes: degree attainment, income, occupational prestige, career-satisfaction, and job-satisfaction. The study used two representative samples of Icelandic youth (N1 = 485; N2 = 1,290) with personality traits measured over 12-years (...
Interest inventories are widely used for career and organizational decision-making. Though it is widely assumed that interest fit predicts job satisfaction, previous meta-analyses reported non- significant relations between interest fit and job satisfaction. However, past meta-analyses were limited by several critical issues, including low statisti...
Vocational interest researchers have long held that individuals will be satisfied when their interests match the characteristics of their work environments. Yet, meta-analyses have found little relationship between interest fit and overall job satisfaction. Notably, studies underlying past meta-analyses shared common limitations. They rarely accoun...
Iceland ranks highly on international indices of gender equality, but the labor market is among the most gender segregated in the world. Gender differences in vocational interests play an important role in explaining these disparities, as interests are highly related to career and edu- cational choices. In this quantitative review, we examine gende...
Vocational interests shape major life decisions and predict major life outcomes. Therefore, it is important to understand how vocational interests develop in young adulthood, a time when young people begin to make their own life decisions. In the present study, we investigated stability and change in vocational interests across a time span of 10 ye...
Vocational interests have a rich history throughout the last century of psychological research, playing an influential role in fields such as personality, development, education, counseling, and organizational psychology. Yet interest measures are typically developed with the goal of matching people to careers, and there has never been a quantitati...
A growing evidence base suggests the importance of goal-related intentional self-regulatory (ISR) skills for adolescents' sustained positive development, but there is little research that links teens' ISR skills to their actual goals. As career development is among the most critical goal domains during adolescence, we address this limitation by exp...
Life goals reflect people’s aspirations of what they want to become and what kind of life they want to live. In two student samples from the United States (N = 385) and Iceland (N = 1,338), we used hierarchical regression and relative weights analyses to first replicate Roberts and Robins (2000) finding that Big Five personality traits predict majo...
The history of vocational interests shows that these measures have great promise for use in job assignment, suggesting that individuals will be more satisfied and successful in their job when they are doing work that interests them. Recent research has provided empirical support for these predictions and demonstrated that the match between an indiv...
Vocational interest assessments are a unique tool in that they are used to predict outcomes far into the future. The use of interest assessments for predictive purposes is supported by decades of research showing that vocational interests are highly stable over time and predict several important career and academic outcomes. Yet new research findin...
Bendill, an indigenous interest inventory, was developed in Iceland to reflect the local labor market and for use with young people making career choices and adults facing career transitions. We constructed four interest inventories: Bendill I for 10th graders, age 15 - 16 (completing compulsory education), Bendill II for upper secondary students (...
Recent research has demonstrated the validity of vocational interests for predicting both work and academic outcomes. As a result of these findings, a number of public and private organizations are now considering the use of vocational interest measures to help individuals make important employment and career decisions. This report describes the de...
Abstract
Personality traits and vocational interests capture different aspects of human individuality that intersect in certain ways. In this longitudinal study, we examined developmental relations between the Big Five traits and RIASEC interests over four time points from late adolescence to young adulthood (age 16 - 24) in a sample of Icelandic y...
The Occupational Information Network (O*NET) is a premier source of occupational information. O*NET is an open–source online platform that contains data for almost all occupations in the United States. These data are continually collected, disseminated, and updated. O*NET data and products are used for many purposes, from research to career develop...
The first goal of this book is to integrate organizational psychology research with the vocational interest literature. Both of these literatures examine individual behavior on the job, but theories and models of vocational interests have been largely ignored in the areas of organizational research where they could contribute the most. As such, the...
Growing evidence on the predictive validity of vocational interests for job performance calls for greater consideration of interest assessment in organizations. However, a consensus on the fundamental dimensions of interests that are aligned with contemporary world of work is still lacking. In the current research, we developed an organizing framew...
Theory and research on person-environment fit suggest that people in the same environment should share homogeneous patterns of individual characteristics. The concept of homogeneity is central to the notion that individuals can be matched to occupations or academic fields of study and will be satisfied with and successful in environments in which t...
Vocational interests predict a variety of important outcomes, and are among the most widely applied individual difference constructs in psychology and education. Despite over 90 years of research, little is known about the longitudinal development of interests. In this meta-analysis, we investigate normative changes in interests through adolescence...
The affective nature of emojis makes them suited for anchoring scales to measure the affective preferences of vocational interest. In Study 1, we conducted a content analysis to identify the five images that best represent a bipolar continuum from strongly like to strongly dislike. In Study 2, we compared the psychometric properties of traditional...
Despite theoretical impetus that a person's vocational personality consists of two affective aspects (liking and disliking) there has been little research into this duality of vocational personality. Using semantic differential techniques, we conducted two studies that assessed people's affective responses to different RIASEC work activities. These...
The affective nature of trait interests suggests that non-verbal anchors, e.g., emojis, can serve as indicators of a person’s (dis)inclination towards interest types. Across two studies, we selected and validated a set of five emojis anchors. Results show that emoji anchors can replace text-based anchors without compromising psychometric properties...
Recently, there has been a growing interest in the study and use of vocational interests for predicting workplace behavior. The renewed attention to this topic is at least partially due to two recent meta-analyses (Nye, Su, Rounds, & Drasgow, 2012; Van Iddekinge, Roth, Putka, & Lanivich, 2011a) demonstrating the validity of interests for predicting...
This report summarizes two studies designed to test the validity of an emoji-anchored
Interest Profiler Short Form (Short-IP; Rounds, Su, Lewis & Rivkin, 2010). The Short-IP is a 60-
item inventory that assesses vocational interests according to Holland’s (1997) Realistic,
Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising and Conventional (RIASEC) pers...
The O*NET Interest Profiler Short Form (Short-IP; Rounds, Su, Lewis, & Rivkin, 2010)
is a 60-item instrument which assesses vocational interests according to Holland’s (1997)
Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising and Conventional (RIASEC) personality
types. This report summarizes the developmental research to create a shorter 30-...
Identifying contemporary racism has been problematic as this type of racism, namely subtle racism, is difficult to discern, and the actions in question can be easily justified by other causes. The present study examined how group status and legitimizing ideologies predict perception of subtle racism. White (high status) and Black (low status) colle...
The degree of women's underrepresentation varies by STEM fields. Women are now overrepresented in social sciences, yet only constitute a fraction of the engineering workforce. In the current study, we investigated the gender differences in interests as an explanation for the differential distribution of women across sub-disciplines of STEM as well...
This chapter begins with a brief review of the historical roots of person–environment fit (P-E fit) theories, retracing how the traditional trait-factor approach evolved into the present-day P-E fit approach to understand individual differences in career choices, behaviors, and outcomes. Next, we identify and define critical elements and assumption...
Despite their significance to both individuals and organizations, interests are often misunderstood, and their predictive power is often overlooked. In this article, we discuss the nature of interests, describe several key features of interests, and, contrary to the received knowledge of many, explain how interests can be used to predict career and...
An Occupational Interest Profiles for updated new and emerging O*NET occupations
The present investigation used an emic approach to develop a set of Icelandic indigenous basic interest scales. An indigenous item pool that is representative of the Icelandic labor market was administered to three samples (N=1043, 1368, and 2218) of upper secondary and higher education students in two studies. A series of item level cluster and fa...
• vocational interests - the road less traveled;
• interest theory and how vocational interests - contribute to understanding of individual differences;
• interest literature since 1970s - using Holland's RIASEC model for organizing research results;
• Holland's Structural Formulations - Holland's theory of vocational personalities and work environ...
Despite early claims that vocational interests could be used to distinguish successful workers and superior students from their peers, interest measures are generally ignored in the employee selection literature. Nevertheless, theoretical descriptions of vocational interests from vocational and educational psychology have proposed that interest con...
Work values profiles were added to new and emering O*NET occupations
We examined a longstanding assumption in vocational psychology that people-things and data-ideas are bipolar dimensions. Two minimal criteria for bipolarity were proposed and examined across 3 studies: (a) The correlation between opposite interest types should be negative; (b) after correcting for systematic responding, the correlation should be gr...
Interest literature since the 1970s has primarily used Holland’s RIASEC model to
organize research results. Therefore, the present chapter begins with a review of
Holland’s (1997) structural formulations of interests. Next, we discuss gender differences
in interests. In particular, Hyde and her colleagues (Hyde, 2005; Hyde &
Linn, 2006) have argued...
Career assessment methods often include measures of individual differences constructs, such as interests, personality, abilities, and values. Although many researchers have recently called for the development of integrated models, career counseling professionals have long faced the challenge of integrating this information into their practice. The...
An emic approach was used to test the structural validity and applicability of Holland's (1997) RIASEC (Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, Conventional) model in Iceland. Archival data from the development of the Icelandic Interest Inventory (Einarsdóttir & Rounds, 2007) were used in the present investigation. The data includ...
Research on group differences in interests has often focused on structural hypotheses and mean-score differences in Holland’s (1997) theory, with comparatively little research on basic interest measures. Group differences in interest profiles were examined using statistical methods for matching individuals with occupations, the C-index, Q correlati...
This report summarizes the initial development research to create a short form of the O*NET Interest Profiler. The primary objective was to develop brief RIASEC scales for use in counseling and consulting settings where it is helpful to have an interest measure that can be completed in a very short period of time. A secondary objective was to incre...
Development of the 60 item IP. Called the Short Form used O*NET Online.
The magnitude and variability of sex differences in vocational interests were examined in the present meta-analysis for Holland's (1959, 1997) categories (Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, and Conventional), Prediger's (1982) Things-People and Data-Ideas dimensions, and the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathema...
In this study, the authors examined the item response process underlying 3 vocational interest inventories: the Occupational Preference Inventory (C.-P. Deng, P. I. Armstrong, & J. Rounds, 2007), the Interest Profiler (J. Rounds, T. Smith, L. Hubert, P. Lewis, & D. Rivkin, 1999; J. Rounds, C. M. Walker, et al., 1999), and the Interest Finder (J. E....
Item response theory was used to address gender bias in interest measurement. Differential item functioning (DIF) technique, SIBTEST and DIMTEST for dimensionality, were applied to the items of the six General Occupational Theme (GOT) and 25 Basic Interest (BI) scales in the Strong Interest Inventory. A sample of 1860 women and 1105 men was used. T...
Despite the key role of attitudes in guiding behavior, no systematic examination of attitudes toward massage has been conducted and no standard assessments have been created. We developed the attitudes toward massage (ATOM) scale, a nine-item measure of an overall attitude toward massage that includes two distinct subscales assessing the attitudes...
