Measuring Achievement, Aptitudes, and Interests 295Strong Interest Inventory
During the academic year 1919–1920, E. K. Strong Jr.
(1884–1963) attended a graduate seminar on interest mea-
surement while attending the Carnegie Institute of Technol-
ogy. What he learned in this seminar peaked his curiosity
about whether interests could be measured in ways that
would predict what kinds of occupations a person would find
enjoyable. In pursuit of this goal, Strong first developed a list
of statements about various activities that test respondents
could endorse as something they liked or disliked to do. He
then keyed these statements to different occupations on the
basis of how people employed in these occupations re-
sponded to them. This latter procedure introduced empiri-
cal keying methodology to interest measurement, just as
Hathaway and McKinley would later introduce it to person-
ality measurement in constructing the MMPI. Several years
of developmental work resulted in the publication of the
Strong Vocational Interest Blank (SVIB) (Strong, 1927). For
persons taking this test, the results provided direct informa-
tion concerning the extent to which their patterns of interests
were similar to or different from those of people working as
lawyers, teachers, production managers, and the like.
Like other self-report inventories that have found an en-
during place in assessment psychology, the SVIB has been
extensively revised since its original publication. The number
of occupations in its empirical base has been increased sub-
stantially, its initially strictly empirical approach to interpret-
ing the implications of its scale scores has been amplified
by theoretical perspectives on the classification of occupa-
tional interests, and its name has evolved into the Strong
Interest Inventory (SII) (Hansen & Campbell, 1985; Harmon,
Hansen, Borgen, & Hammer, 1994). Stable since its incep-
tion, however, has been the status of Strong’s instrument as
the most frequently used among all interest inventories.
Kuder Occupational Interest Survey
Frederic Kuder (1903–2000) set about measuring occupa-
tional interests differently from Strong in two respects. First,
instead of presenting individual items to be endorsed as “like”
or “dislike,” he constructed groups of three alternative activi-
ties and asked respondents to indicate which of each triad
they would most prefer to do. Second, instead of scoring re-
spondents’ preferences for their relevance to specific occupa-
tions, he developed scales for relating them to general areas
of interest, including Outdoor, Mechanical, Computational,
Scientific, Persuasive, Artistic, Literary, Musical, Social Ser-
vice, and Clerical. A measure embodying these characteristics
was published as the Kuder Personal Preference Record
(Kuder, 1939) with scales for seven areas of interest. As an
alternative to the Strong, the Kuder pointed less directly to
specific occupations that respondents should consider but
provided more information about personal characteristics that
would be likely to have a bearing on whether they would
enjoy certain kinds of work.
Kuder’s measure was expanded in subsequent revisions to
feature 20 broad interest areas, a downward extension for
use with elementary and high school students, and its cur-
rent name, the Kuder Occupational Interest Survey (KOIS;
Kuder & Zytowski, 1991). Paralleling the evolution of the
SVIB from a strictly occupationally scaled measure to one
that incorporates as well a theoretically based classification
of occupational interests, the KOIS now includes some occu-
pational as well as basic interest scores.Holland Self-Directed SearchLike Strong and Kuder before him, John Holland began his
work on measuring vocational interests as an empiricist, con-
cerned with collecting data on likes, dislikes, and preferences
that would have predictive value for successful occupational
choice. Early on, however, he opted for a rational-empirical
approach to scale construction in which variables are selected
on the basis of some guiding concepts and empirical testing
with criterion groups is employed only secondarily to refine
and revise item content. Holland’s guiding concepts were
rooted in his belief that occupational preferences derive from
a person’s self-concept and personality style, and the first
product of his approach was the Vocational Preference Inven-
tory (VPI; Holland, 1953). The VPI yielded scale scores re-
lated to broad aspects of personality styles or attitudes, and in
subsequent revisions the core VPI scales evolved into the
following six: Realistic (R), Investigative (I), Artistic (A),
Social (S), Enterprising (E), and Conventional (C) (Holland,
1985). Some additional empirically derived scales were
added to the instrument, but the RIASEC group became
the model on which Holland elaborated an influential
personality-based theory of career choice and satisfaction
(Holland, 1966). Holland postulated that every individual’s
personality comprises some combination of these six styles,
and he maintained that the extent to which each style is pre-
sent provides a personality description that has direct impli-
cations for career planning.
Holland later used this model to design the Self-Directed
Search (SDS), which generates scale scores for the RIASEC
components and offers suggestions concerning the kinds
of occupations for which persons with various scale combi-
nations might find themselves suitable (Holland, 1979;
Holland, Fritzsche, & Powell, 1994). A unique feature of the