Then I assess career confidence by listening for self-efficacy beliefs
and problem-solving competence. This assessment of career choice
dispositions and competencies allows me to understand how clients
construe their career concern, as well as their readiness and resources
for coping with it. If the concern is about stabilizing rather than
choosing, then I assess dispositions toward and competence for
adapting to an organizational culture, performing job tasks, forming
congenial relationships with coworkers, maintaining productive
work habits and attitudes, and planning to advance both within
one’s organization and career (Dix & Savickas, 1995). This assess-
ment of work adaptation can be performed using data elicited from
an inventory such as the Career Mastery Inventory (Crites, 1996) or
in conversations about work (Hirsch, Jackson, & Kidd, 2001).
Having collected data about the client’s life space and career
adaptability, the first half of the assessment is finished. Attention
turns naturally from assessing the processof career construction to
assessing its content,as contained in vocational self-concepts and
expressed in vocational identities.
Assessing Vocational Self-Concept and Career Themes.The third
step in constructivist career assessment investigates vocational self-
concepts and career themes. In contrast to the assessment of voca-
tional identity with objective, quantitative measures, the assessment
of vocational self-concepts relies on subjective, qualitative methods
(Watkins & Savickas, 1990). The constructivist career assessment
model examines two perspectives on subjective experience: (1) a
cross-sectional view of vocational self-concepts and (2) a longitu-
dinal view of career themes. The view from the cross-sectional per-
spective on self-concepts may be looked at through adjective
checklists (Johansson, 1975), card sorts (Hartung, 1999), or the
repertory grid technique (Neimeyer, 1989). These methods reveal
the content of a self-concept, as well as the attributes used to con-
strue occupations. As an alternative to elicitation methods, coun-
selors can use procedures such as those devised by Mathewson and
Rochlin (1956) to appraise clients’ vocational self-concepts directly
from their oral behavior during an interview.
188 CAREER CHOICE AND DEVELOPMENT