Date of Award

1-1-1984

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Counseling Psychology & Community Services

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to construct an instrument to measure career indecision from a multidimensional perspective. The instrument was comprised of three scales. Each was designed to correspond to a different dimension of career indecision. The research consisted of two related stages. The first stage focused on the construction of the three scales including item development. The second stage involved the examination of the psychometric properties of the scales. In so doing, the internal consistency, temporal stability, independence, and relationship of the three developed scales with external criteria were assessed.Item development initially involved the analysis of the three types of indecision into component parts. An item pool was generated by two researchers familiar with the indecision literature. The item pool was randomized and presented to four doctoral level students who, following a brief training session, independently classified each item into what was judged to be the appropriate scale.The scales, along with criteria measures and a demographic questionnaire, were administered to a student sample (n = 280) comprised largely of freshmen and sophomores. The scales were also administered to a second student sample on two occasions separated by a six week time interval.The reliability of the three scales was very acceptable. Internal consistency reliability for each of the three scales exceeded .90. The chronic and developmental scales proved to be highly stable over a six week interval while the situational scale, as expected, demonstrated more moderate stability.Each of the scales effectively discriminated between decided and undecided students. However, the validity data generally questions the differential validity of the three scales. All three scales demonstrated moderately high intercorrelations. Factor analysis across five measures of indecision also suggested a single unidimensional structure across the measures. In essence, the scales demonstrated highly acceptable reliability, but failed to show differential validity.

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