Early assessment of career-related interest was attained by asking persons to estimate how they felt about an occupation or activity (Fryer, 1931). Individuals were allowed to try out an occupation by taking courses in the occupational field, reading information about the occupation, or by actually working in the occupation in an effort to increase the accuracy of an individual’s estimates about an occupation or activity.
During the early 1920s, interest questionnaires, such as checklists or rating scales, replaced the try-out methods to save time and cost. One of the most popular checklists of the time, Miner’s Analysis of Work Interests (1922), was taken individually and then discussed during a counseling session. Next came rating scales, with Kitson’s (1925) Vocation-to-Vocation rating scale being one of the most popular during the late 1920s. Kitson’s scale asked people to rate the vocation in which they were actually employed in relation to all other vocations.
Following on the heels of interest questionnaires, interest inventories were developed in an effort to provide better estimates of interests (Hansen, 1984). Interest inventories were designed with a statistical component for summarizing an individual’s interest into a score representing the degree of interest in a field, profession, or occupation. Interest inventories that incorporated objective scoring procedures were the most common. Though appearing before Miner’s (1922) and Kitson’s (1925) checklists, Kelley’s (1914) battery of questions was the first to be scored and appeared to have provided a template for later inventories. Kelley’s instrument combined both an inventory that asked for estimates of interests and an objective test that measured one’s knowledge about certain occupations.
In 1919, Clarence S. Yoakum taught a seminar at Carnegie Institute of Technology during which a pool of over 1000 items was developed without involving any statistical analysis of the items. Rather, an attempt was made to write items representing the entire domain of interests (Hansen, 1984). Though later investigators worked to identify, through statistical analysis, the worth of the original items in terms of the degree to which the items discriminated between the like, dislike, and indifferent responses of various groups, it was determined that changes in society, technological discoveries, and technological obsolescence make the process of refining items pools a never ending challenge. In 1921, the Carnegie Interest Inventory was developed at another Yoakum seminar by condensing several interest inventories developed using samples of the items formulated during the 1919 seminar (Hansen, 1984). Much work was done that closely resembled the original Carnegie Interest Inventory, including the Occupational Interest Inventory (Freyd, 1923), Interest Report Blank (Cowdery, 1926), General Interest Survey (Kornhauser, 1927), Purdue Interest Report (Remmers, 1929), Interest Analysis Blank (Hubbard, 1930), and Minnesota Interest Inventory (Paterson, Elliot, Anderson, Toops, & Heidbreder, 1930). Some of the early interest inventories have been adapted over time and some have disappeared, but one of the most important outcomes of the Youkum Seminar is the Strong Vocational Interest Blank–Strong-Campbell Interest Inventory (SVIB-SCII) because it is still the most frequently used test in college counseling centers (Hansen, 1984).
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