Validity

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.

View 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.

The next step examined whether persons satisfactorily employed in particular occupations within the 17 different Basic Career Directions would be expected to score highest in the Career Interest Activities area in which they were employed. Their scores would also be expected to differ from persons employed in other occupations, even in closely related areas.

To test this criterion group problem several occupational samples were tested.

View Table 2 ›

The bank tellers sample came from a larger group that had been tested six months earlier. Researchers then followed up to identify which of the original 26 individuals were still employed in their positions. They also looked at which employees were viewed by their supervisors as competent and which individuals reported good job satisfaction themselves.

This group was then matched with a comparable group of elementary and junior high school classroom teachers.

View Table 3 ›