The World of Work Inventory went through several systematic steps to determine validity of the individual items, the scales, and total profile analysis. First the items within each scale were developed out of the job analysis and job description presented in the Dictionary of Occupational Titles and developed by the U.S. Department of Labor. Then personal job analysis and job descriptions were collected by Dr. Ripley, his graduate students, and five years of summer institute members. Each item was written around job activities and tasks to maintain job relevancy. These items were then made into homogeneous scales where an item was only used once and only in one scale. The scales for the Career Interest Activities part of the Inventory were then reviewed by four or five judges in each of the 117 Career Families after the item clusters were developed through job analysis and career family grouping. The judges were people actually working in the occupation, supervisors of the workers, and teachers/trainers of the occupations. All four or five judges had to agree on the use of an item before final placement in a particular scale. Rewording of statements was made by the judges. For example, in the clerical scale the judges were a legal secretary in Los Angeles, a private business school owner and trainer in Phoenix, a business education high school teacher in Minneapolis, a supervisor of a clerk typist pool in Pittsburgh and a business machine operator in Phoenix. After many revisions, and a final form developed for the instrument, a stratified sample by age, sex, educational level, minority group membership, and occupational groupings was used to determine the inter-item, intra-scale correlations and the inter-scale correlations. There were 7,280 inter-item, intra-scale correlations computed for the 17 Career Interest Activities scale, the 12 Job Satisfaction Indicator Scales and the 6 Vocational Training Potential Scales. This resulted in .9136% of the inter-item, intra-scale correlations using the Pearson Product Moment method being significant at or beyond the .001 level. The inter-scale correlations of the 35 different scales were then determined.
These results are shown in Table 1 ›
As expected, there were higher correlations between various related Career Interest Activities areas and lower correlations between Career Interest Activities areas and Job Satisfaction Indicator Areas and even lower with Vocational Training Potentials. Thus indicating that the three areas are measuring different factors. However there are high correlations between the related scales of the Career Interest Activities areas and the Job Satisfaction Indicators such as sales and influencing.
Next, if in fact the World of Work Inventory was valid, then persons satisfactorily employed in particular occupations in the 17 different Basic Career Directions would be expected to score the highest in that Career Interest Activities area in which they are employed and different than persons in occupations even in closely related areas. To test this criterion group problem several occupational samples were tested.
An example of mean scores of persons employed and satisfied in three different occupations in three different yet closely related careers is shown in Table 2 ›
The bank tellers sample had been the result of testing a larger sample six months earlier and following up on which of the original sample of 26 was still on the job, seen as competent employees by their supervisors, and perceived by themselves as having good job satisfaction. This group was then matched to a comparable group of elementary/junior high school classroom teachers.
The total profile results are shown in Table 3 ›