maintain consistency across repeated tellings, will figure promi-
nently in her or his vocational identity.
Assessing Vocational Identity. The fourth step in constructivist
career counseling uses traditional person-environment procedures,
such as interest inventories, to draw an objective picture of a client’s
vocational identity and then to sketch out how particular occupa-
tions might validate that identity. Counselors who do constructivist
career counseling typically measure interests with the Self-Directed
Search(SDS; Holland, 1985) or Strong Interest Inventory(SII; Har-
mon, Hansen, Borgen, & Hammer, 1994). The RIASEC summary
code from the SDS or the SII and the occupational scales in the SII
indicate “degree of resemblance” to workers employed in different
occupations. Rather than measuring expressed interests, resemblance
scores suggest identifications, if not possible identities. These indica-
tors of similarity paint an objective picture of a client’s vocational
identity—a life portrait that can be appreciated best in the light of the
client’s unique vocational self-concept and career themes. Accord-
ingly, counselors seek to comprehend how the objectively identified
occupations might manifest a client’s vocational self-concept and
career themes.
Integrating Data and Interpreting Narrative. As a transition
from assessment to intervention, the counselor organizes the data
about life space, career adaptability, vocational self-concept, and
vocational identity and interprets them to the client. Depending on
the counselor’s style, this interpretation may take the traditional
form, which presents results from each assessment separately, or it
may take an integrated form, which blends all of the interview data
and test results into a narrative (Crites, 1981). I prefer an integra-
tive interpretation that realistically and sensitively narrates the
client’s “own story.” The narrative should reconstruct the client’s
character with greater agency and self-consciousness, as well as
focus the script on a generativity plot of imagined steps along exist-
ing thematic lines. The narrative should be told in dramatic form,
190 CAREER CHOICE AND DEVELOPMENT