Structure of Interests of Asian-American College Students

Abstract

Unweighted multidimensional scaling (MDS) analyses were used to investigate whether J. L. Holland’s (1985) theoretical structure of interests described the interest structures for 2 cultural groups and for genders within those groups. The intercorrelation matrices of the Strong Interest Inventory General Occupational Themes, for samples of female and male Asian-American and White-American university students were submitted separately to MDS analysis. Metric, 2-dimensional solutions for each sample demonstrated that a circumplex structure underlay the interest domain for all 4 groups. Results were mixed in support of the hexagonal structure and the Realistic–Investigative–Artistic–Social–Enterprising–conventional ordering suggested by Holland’s theory. Possible explanations and implications of these results are discussed within the context of existing research on Asian cultural thought and practice.

Full text

Journal of Counseling Psychology
1994,
Vol. 41, No. 2, 256-264Copyright 1994 by the American Psychological Association. Inc.
OO22-O167/94/$3.0O
Structure of Interests of Asian-American College Students
Beth E. Haverkamp, Rose C. Collins, and Jo-Ida C. Hansen
Unweighted multidimensional scaling (MDS) analyses were used to investigate whether J. L.
Holland's (1985) theoretical structure of interests described the interest structures for 2 cultural
groups and for genders within those groups. The intercorrelation matrices of the Strong Interest
Inventory General Occupational Themes, for samples of female and male Asian-American and
White-American university students were submitted separately to MDS analysis. Metric, 2-dimen-
sional solutions for each sample demonstrated that a circumplex structure underlay the interest
domain for all 4 groups. Results were mixed in support of the hexagonal structure and the
Realistic-Investigative-Artistic-Social-Enterprising-Conventional ordering suggested by Hol-
land's theory. Possible explanations and implications of these results are discussed within the
context of existing research on Asian cultural thought and practice.
Psychologists' curiosity about the underlying structure of
the vocational interest domain appeared early in the 20th
century, beginning with Thurstone's (1931) factor analysis
of E. K. Strong, Jr.'s interest data. A few decades later,
an influential factor analysis conducted by Guilford,
Christensen, Bond, and Sutton (1954) had an impact on the
theorizing of Roe (1957) and Holland (1959). Vocational
psychologists have maintained an interest in the area, and
contemporary analyses of structure have focused on the fit
between empirical structures of interest inventories, derived
from various samples, and theoretical models of the struc-
ture of interests (e.g., Cole & Hanson, 1971; Gati, 1982;
Meir & Ben-Yehuda, 1976; Prediger, 1982; Wakefield &
Doughtie, 1973).
The results of these investigations have produced identi-
fiable structures, particularly in support of Holland's (1985)
hypothesized configuration of
interests.
In Holland's theory,
the six vocational personality types—Realistic, Investiga-
tive,
Artistic, Social, Enterprising, and Conventional
(RIASEC)—compose the points of an equilateral hexagon.
Along the circumference of the hexagon, each type is hy-
pothesized to fall between the two other types to which it is
most similar and to fall opposite from its least similar type.
Research on Holland's hexagon, which was primarily based
Beth E. Haverkamp, Department of Counseling, University of
British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada; Rose C.
Collins and Jo-Ida
C.
Hansen, Department of Psychology, Univer-
sity of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
This project was supported by a research grant from the Uni-
versity of Minnesota (Twin Cities) Computer Center.
We wish to thank Kurt Hansen, Barbara Chapin, Dallis Perry,
and the staff
at
the University of Minnesota's Asian/Pacific Amer-
ican Learning Resource Center for their assistance in obtaining the
data used in this analysis. We also wish to thank Mark Davison,
Department of Educational Psychology, University of Minnesota
(Twin Cities), for consultation on the multidimensional scaling
procedure.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to
Jo-Ida
C.
Hansen, 75 East River Road, Department of Psychology,
Elliott Hall, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota
55455.
on White Americans, has generally supported the RIASEC
ordering of the types (Prediger, 1982; Rounds, Davison, &
Dawis, 1979; Rounds & Zevon, 1983), but "the shape of the
configurations rarely approximates a hexagon" (Rounds &
Zevon, 1983, p. 496).
The most ambitious recent investigation of the structure
of interests has been Rounds's (in press) use of three-way
multidimensional scaling (MDS) analysis to produce a sum-
mary configuration of 60 RIASEC correlation matrices pub-
lished between 1965 and 1986. The evaluation of scores on
the basis of Holland's six general interest types found that
the resulting structure supported both the simple RIASEC
order hypothesis and the more stringent calculus assump-
tion, which specified the internal relationships among the
types.
The 60 analyzed matrices were primarily based on
samples that were from the United States and predominantly
Caucasian, which brings into question the generalizability
of the results to nonmajority cultural groups.
A small number of researchers have recently extended the
investigation of Holland's (1985) theorized structure of
interests to the cross-cultural and cross-ethnic domains. The
issues of culture and ethnicity are of theoretical interest
relative to the question of whether the structure of interests
is uniform across groups or whether it differs in meaningful
ways.
In assessing structural equivalence across cultures,
researchers have attempted to determine whether Holland's
six types are identifiable and whether the observed ordering
and shape of the RIASEC configuration are comparable. As
Fouad and Dancer (1992) noted, documented variations in
Holland's model for different populations would suggest
that interest structure is not universal and may be influenced
by culture or ethnicity.
Two recent investigations have assessed the structure of
interests in minority populations with the General Occupa-
tional Theme (GOT) scores of the Strong Interest Inventory
(SII;
Hansen & Campbell, 1985) as the measure of
Holland's six types. Swanson (1992) used a geometric in-
terpoint distance analysis (Wakefield & Doughtie, 1973)
and MDS to assess the correspondence of GOT scores with
Holland's hexagonal model for African-American college
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