Practice and research in career counseling and development—2003

Career Development Quarterly, Dec, 2004 by John C. Dagley, Shannon K. Salter

New Scales

Stead and Schultheiss constructed and validated the Childhood Career Development Scale, a children's measure of career development that is based on nine dimensions of Super's (1990) model of childhood career development (curiosity, exploration, information, key figures, locus of control, interests, time perspective, self-concept, and planfulness). A principal component analysis for Sample 1 (the sample was randomly divided into two groups) yielded 48 items that accounted for 38% of the variance and showed an internal consistency alpha of .89. Eight components were identified, leaving out only one--interests--of Super's nine dimensions. According to Super's conceptualization, interests usually begin to become important from age 11 on. The fact that nearly 50% of the sample was age 10 or less may help explain this result. All in all, the Childhood Career Development Scale shows excellent promise.

The Career-Related Parent Support Scale (Turner, Alliman-Brissett, Lapan, Udipi, & Ergun) was developed to assess adolescents' perceptions of parental support in the four areas identified by Bandura (1997) as the major sources of a person's self-efficacy: instrumental assistance (in skill development), career-related modeling, verbal encouragement, and emotional support. Factor analytic data confirmed the fit of the proposed four-factor model.

Ethical and Professional Issues in Career Assessment

The ethical and professional issues associated with career assessment on the Internet seem almost limitless. Barak opened a special issue of the Journal of Career Assessment (Walsh, c) devoted to ethical and professional issues with a brief description of the types of problems associated with at least some online career assessment. Issues of particular concern include the frequent absence of relevant psychometric data, questionable construct validity, inappropriate use of tests, invalid and incomplete interpretation profiles, privacy and confidentiality breaches, and the effects of the digital divide and other cultural limitations. Without pop-up blockers, individuals can hardly turn on a computer without being bombarded with commercial messages, many of which advertise assessments of one type or another. One current message advertises an IQ test that can supposedly tell the person taking the test online what jobs best fit his or her IQ. Although there are positive uses of online assessment, the present problems are significant not only in number but also in potential harm. Legal regulation of career assessment online is largely irrelevant because of the global nature of the Internet. International law to guide Internet use is not a reality.

Sampson, Purgar, and Shy added substance and focus to the consideration of issues pertaining to career assessment on the Internet. First, they defined the parameters: "A test is a standardized, scored, numeric measure of a fairly specific construct or behavior where meaning is related to the scores" (p. 24). This definition helps to distinguish between professional tests and measures on the Internet and those that appear to be career tests but actually are more properly termed surveys, questionnaires, or checklists. If an instrument meets the criteria and is considered a test, then professional standards in existence apply. Reflective of meta-analytic findings (Whiston, Breicheisen, & Stephens) that career outcomes are more favorably associated with career counselor involvement, as compared to counselor-free career interventions, Sampson et al. asserted that computer-based test interpretation should not replace a practitioner but be implemented by a practitioner in a consulting role, using other data as well. These authors also made the important point that the validity of a test is separate from the validity of a computer-based test interpretation.