Assessing Career Indecision

Transcription

1 Journal of Vocational Behavior 55, (1999) Article ID jvbe , available online at on Assessing Career Indecision Samuel H. Osipow The Ohio State University This paper discusses Holland s work toward the understanding and measurement of career indecision that has grown out of his long-term theoretical and empirical efforts. A general review of the history of career decision-making measures is included, along with a brief discussion of the applications of career theory and measures to practices in counseling Academic Press Key Words: career indecision; indecisiveness. Career indecision has been a major concern of career psychologists for many years. Originally focused on the problem of career decision making of students, the issue now encompasses a broad life spectrum because of the increased frequency of events that require people to revise their career decisions over their life span. Instead of facing the need to make a career decision only during late adolescence and early adulthood (if that was ever really the case) revised career plans seem to be needed at a variety of life transitions. Each of these transitions poses the potential for career indecision to occur. The awareness of this lifelong need further increases the need to develop ways to measure and intervene in career decision problems. Prior to the 1960s, even though one of the most frequent problems college students presented to career counselors was that of career indecision, there was no standardized method to assess either the degree or the nature of career indecision. The usual procedure followed when a measure of career indecision was sought was to ask respondents to use a Likert-type scale to rate their status with respect to one, two, or three questions about their degree of decidedness. In addition, little effort was made to differentiate between indecision and indecisiveness. We now see indecision as a developmental phase through which individuals may pass on their way to reaching a decision. Thus, we have come to see career indecision as a state which comes and goes over time as a decision is made, is implemented, grows obsolete, and eventually leads to the need to make a new decision (producing a temporary state of indecision). The process then begins again. It has been speculated that over the life span the time period Address reprint requests to the author at 330 Eastmoor Boulevard Columbus, OH osipow.1@osu.edu /99 $30.00 Copyright 1999 by Academic Press All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

2 148 SAMUEL H. OSIPOW over which the cycle occurs gradually widens, so that the frequency of the need to make a career decision anew occurs less frequently. Indecisiveness is a different process. Whereas indecision is a state that is normal in human development, indecisiveness is not an ordinary part of human growth and development, but is, instead, a personal trait which generalizes across situations demanding decisions. Thus, the most common way for us to determine whether or not an individual s career uncertainty is indecision or indecisiveness is retrospectively. In other words, if someone repeatedly has trouble making career or other decisions to the point where closure is not reached in time to implement the appropriate behavior, we would probably see that person as indecisive. An individual can be undecided without being indecisive. However, an indecisive person would of necessity display undecided behavior at many decision points during life. Interest in assessing career indecision became widespread in the 1960s and 1970s. It was an era when many individuals had several career options, the result of which often was indecision. In order to better assess counseling outcome, reduction of indecision became an important issue. This was one of the forces leading to the development of more standard measures of career indecision. Holland s theory also came to the fore during this period. His theory was originally formulated in the 1950s and has been revised and updated several times, most recently in It presents an ideal way to approach career indecision because one of the outcomes of the discrepancy between one s personal type and one s choice or prospective choice is likely to be the inability to decide. It is therefore, understandable, that one of the events John Holland became concerned with was the measurement of indecision. Career counselors are of necessity increasingly interested in treating people who are undecided about options. In providing interventions to help people make better and more timely decisions it is important to know whether the behavior observed is indecision or indecisiveness. It has been assumed that counseling to resolve indecision would have a different face than would counseling dealing with indecisiveness (although as far as I know there are no clear cut empirical studies to support this view). Career counseling for indecision is usually a cognitive based approach in which logical processes are employed in collecting, sifting, and evaluating relevant career and personal information. Counseling for indecisiveness would will probably resemble traditional therapy approaches that examine the personality antecedents of the problem. Recently a point of view has developed that sees career counseling and psychotherapy as having many common features (Hackett, 1993), perhaps particularly when assisting indecisive individuals. In addition, the emotional aspects of career decision making are more widely appreciated by counselors, and conversely, the cognitive aspects of personal counseling are seen to be more useful than formerly. APPROACHES TO MEASURING INDECISION When the first attempts were made to measure career indecision, there was no theoretical context available to guide the effort. Holland s theory had the poten-

3 ASSESSING CAREER INDECISION 149 tial to serve such a purpose. Since Holland s theory assigns people to various personality types which correspond to career fields it is conceivable that those who belong to two or more types equally would be likely to be undecided about their careers. Such indecision would be most likely to result if the two types that the individual scored the highest on were in fields quite different from each other. For example, if a Realistic person scored equally high on the Social scale, a reasonable prediction is that since these two very different types do not lead to careers that would logically include characteristics of both or lead to job settings satisfying both types, the result would be indecision. It is also conceivable that a person with low scores on all of the types would not have interests sufficiently crystallized to permit a commitment to one field to be made. A third possibility is that a person with high scores on all fields would similarly have so many interests that a decision might be hard to make. Finally, highly talented people, who possess many career possibilities as a result of their wide-ranging abilities, are likely to have trouble sorting among them. The result of that would be indecision. The first three possibilities noted above could all be derived from Holland s theory. The fourth one is related to the theory but the theory is not necessary to lead to it. In an early study dealing with career indecision, Holland and Holland (1977) proposed that indecision is the result of difficulties in personal and vocational identity. This study seems to have led to a more elaborate formulation of an approach to measuring career indecision as reflected in an instrument known as MY VOCATIONAL SITUATION (MVS) (Holland, Daiger, & Power, 1980; Holland, Gottfredson & Power, 1980). The scale attempts to diagnose the difficulties people have in vocational decision-making. According to Holland, Daiger, and Power (1980) such difficulties result from issues related to vocational identity, occupational information, and career barriers. The Vocational Identity scale measures the clarity of an individual s goals, interests, and talents as they relate to vocational decisions. The Occupational Information scale allows the counselor to determine where, if anywhere, the client s career knowledge is deficient. The Barriers scale provides a list of those obstacles that clients feel may impede their career decision-making. It should be clear that by using these three categories, the career counselor is in a position to develop a treatment plan for intervening in the client s career indecision. If Vocational Identify appears to be an issue, counseling to help clarify and define the client s self-knowledge would be in order. If there appears to be a lack of occupational information, this may easily be corrected through the use of a variety of well-known sources, such as computer based career exploration problems or such occupational guides as the Gottfredson and Holland DICTIONARY OF HOLLAND OCCUPATIONAL CODES (1996). If the Barriers scale reveals significant information about impediments to the career decision-making process, these may be addressed directly in counseling. At about the same time, Osipow, Carney, Winer, Yanico, and Koshier (1976) were developing another similar but different approach to assessing career

4 150 SAMUEL H. OSIPOW indecision. The CAREER DECISION SCALE (CDS) was the result of a series of brainstorming sessions conducted by four of its authors (Osipow, Winer, Koschier, & Yanico, 1975) in which an attempt was made to identify all, or at least as many as possible of the reasons people offer to explain the sources of their career indecision. (For a history of the development of the CAREER DECISION SCALE see Winer, 1992.) Originally conceived as an instrument which would identify specific sources of career indecision where each item could stand by itself clearly enough to determine differential counseling interventions, it evolved into a typological measure (Savickas & Jarjoura, 1991). Of the original 16 content items, various factor analyses revealed that the items were not independent but could be separated into factors, usually four (for details, see the CAREER DECISION SCALE MANUAL, Osipow, 1987). Although there has been some controversy regarding the accuracy, or even of the existence of the factors, (Laplante, Coallier, Sabourin, & Martin, 1994; Shimizu, Vondracek, Schulenberg, & Hostetler, 1988; Schulenberg, Shimizu, Vondracek, & Hostetler, 1988; Shimizu, Vondracek, & Hostetler, 1994), it does appear that some organizing substructure exists. Most users of the instrument, however, do not rely on the factor structure, but rather use the total indecision score of the measure as an overall index of one s level of career indecision. Examination of a person s responses to individual items can reveal information about the sources of the indecision, which can then be used to direct counseling approaches to the problem. Even more common, the instrument is used as a pre-post measure to establish what, if any, changes have occurred in career indecision after counseling. It is interesting to note that the CDS was an instrument derived totally from an empirical approach. Yet another approach to the measurement of career indecision developed in the 1970s was Harren s (1976) ASSESSMENT OF CAREER DECISION-MAKING. In a manner different from the CDS and MVD this measure approached the issue of career indecision using Tiedeman s and O Hara s (1963) framework to career development. In more recent times, what appear to be second and third generation approaches to the measurement of career indecision have been appearing. Notable among these is the measure of Chartrand, Robbins, Morrill, and Boggs (1990) known as the CAREER FACTORS INVENTORY and Jones (1989) CAREER DECISION PROFILE. These instruments approach career indecision with the view that it is multidimensional. Such an approach allows a more precise diagnosis of the causes of career indecision than do the earlier measures, and, as a result, may be more effective in leading to counseling interventions. Most recently, Gati, Krausz, and Osipow (1996) have developed an instrument called the CAREER DECISION DIFFICULTIES QUESTIONNAIRE. In contrast to many of the earlier measures, this instrument has grown out of a theoretical taxonomy of the difficulties encountered in the career decisionmaking process. The taxonomy strives to identify several categories of the sources of career decision-making difficulties. It begins with dividing the diffi-

5 ASSESSING CAREER INDECISION 151 culties into those that occur prior to beginning the decision making process and those that occur during the process itself. Those difficulties that occur prior to the process involve a lack of readiness resulting from lack of motivation, indecisiveness, and those that result from beliefs in dysfunctional myths about career decision making. The difficulties that occur during the decision making process are further subdivided into lack of information about the self, occupations, ways of obtaining information, and information about the career decision making process itself. Under the category of inconsistent information are included problems resulting from unreliable information, internal conflicts, and external conflicts. A 44-item questionnaire was devised to measure each of these various issues, the 44 items corresponding to the 44 difficulties identified in the theoretical model. The resulting questionnaire is called the CAREER DECISION DIFFI- CULTIES QUESTIONNAIRE (CDDQ). Results of several early studies (Gati, Krausz, & Osipow, 1996; Osipow & Gati, 1998; Gati, Osipow, Krausz & Saka, in press) suggest that the instrument has a sound psychometric base and has potential for applications in career counseling. The structure of this instrument lends itself to the long sought goal of achieving the differential problem, differential counseling approach to career counseling. Individual items can be examined separately in the search for clues to identify sources of decision-making problems that can be addressed specifically in counseling. Or, since the instrument is composed of a number of independent scales, the scale scores can be used to determine sources of difficulties, that, in turn, themselves, can be applied to the search for improved career decision making outcomes. Thus, sophistication in the assessment of career indecision has come a long way since the early efforts of Osipow et al. (1976) and Holland, Daiger, and Power (1980). THE ASSESSMENT OF INDECISIVENESS There is a literature studying indecisiveness. Originally motivated to help us understand and identify those individuals in whom career indecision was a trait rather than a state, more recent efforts in the study of indecisiveness have been applied to the problems individuals have in dealing with decisions concerning a range of major life issues including but not limited to career issues. It has been very difficult to measure indecisiveness as a separate entity from indecision. One problem has been in the identification of an appropriate criterion group. For example, in the career area, the underlying cause of some portion of those individuals who are undecided stems from transitory issues, such as those measured by an instrument like the CDDQ, while others reflect more stable personality factors. The difficulty is that since indecision and indecisiveness often look the same, how do we know when someone is indecisive versus undecided? If we cannot separate them, it becomes next to impossible to devise a way to measure indecisiveness separately from indecision.

6 152 SAMUEL H. OSIPOW Haraburda (1998) examined the problem of measuring indecisiveness. His dissertation includes an extensive review of the studies dealing with indecisiveness in a variety of life domains. Haraburda s research (1996; 1998) has attempted to deal with these problems inherent in measuring indecisiveness and have produced encouraging preliminary results. Haraburda used a variety of situations in which to couch indecision, ranging from career to numerous interpersonal issues. In his first study (1996) he developed preliminary measures of indecisiveness across a variety of domains and tested their validity against other, related measures. In his second study (1998) he examined decisiveness in the context of conflict resolution and social relationships using his scale, the MULTI-DOMAIN DECISIVENESS SCALE. He found that subjects who scored high in decisiveness were less neurotic and had fewer psychological symptoms than did those who were indecisive. Those subjects who were low in decisiveness scored lower in such characteristics as extraversion, openness to new experiences, agreeability, and conscientiousness, though these characteristics were highly influenced by social desirability response styles. These results allow us to speculate about the nature of those individuals who are indecisive and consequently, to think further about the design of interventions to deal with indecisiveness as opposed to indecision. The results also lead to the consideration of the question of whether or not the personality attributes of the indecisive apply to the undecided as well. COUNSELING APPLICATIONS Now that we can measure indecision in a reasonably adequate fashion, how can we use that information in counseling to help people resolve their indecision with a minimum of difficulty? Several directions emerge as possibilities. The Campbell and Cellini (1981) TAXONOMY OF ADULT CAREER DE- VELOPMENT PROBLEMS can be useful. This taxonomy uses a set of specific statements about the problems people have in major career problem areas: Career decision-making, the implementation of career plans, and adapting to organizational and institutional events. More specifically and of special interest, the sub-problem areas in the career decision-making category include gathering information, generating, evaluating, and selecting alternatives, and formulating plans for implementing decisions. The content of the major career indecision scales relates to these problem areas, and, thus, can provide a way to differentially diagnose career indecision problems to focus interventions related specifically to an individual s own, particular problems. Other measures also exist to help in this regard. The CAREER DECISION- MAKING SELF-EFFICACY SCALE (CSMSE) (Taylor & Betz, 1983) can identify those aspects of the career decision making process itself in which clients may be deficient. Having done that, emphasis in counseling can be placed on helping individuals acquire the skills needed to progress further in their career decision status. This measure can be especially useful in identifying the gaps in a person s decision making skills that can point to specific issues for focus in career counseling.

7 ASSESSING CAREER INDECISION 153 Career self-efficacy itself is also a concept that may be important in resolving career indecision. One such measure is the short form of the Task Specific Occupational Self-efficacy Scale (Osipow, Temple, & Rooney, 1993). This measure identifies the degree of self-efficacy an individual reports in each of four major content areas related to careers. Having so identified the strengths and weaknesses individuals report in these four areas, the counselor can try to change the clients selfefficacy expectations to be more congruent with their objectives. This is especially relevant if decision making is blocked by a sense that an objective is not attainable because of uncertainty about one s capacity to perform adequately in preferred field. A similar result can be obtained through the use of Swanson and Tokar s CAREER BARRIERS INVENTORY (CBI) (1991) which allows the identification of those issues that clients perceive to block their entry into a chosen field. Identification of these barriers can lead to direct efforts in counseling to eliminate or overcome them. The CDDQ (Gati et al., 1996) can be used in the same way: that is, to identify specific features contributing to the individual s inability to make a career decision and, thus, lead to attempts to directly resolve those barriers. CONCLUSION It is clear that the methods to assess various aspects of career indecision over the past 25 years have become plentiful and sophisticated. These methods have led to counseling applications, something that is a hallmark of Holland s approach to career issues. It is impressive that John Holland could have done such seminal work on indecision while at the same time doing all his other creative and innovative theoretical development, instrumentation, and empirical research in the career development field. His contribution to the understanding of career indecision is one of the many several significant legacies Holland leaves to us. REFERENCES Campbell, R. E., & Cellini, J. V. (1981). A diagnostic taxonomy of adult career development problems. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 19, Chartrand, J. M., Robbins, S. B., Morrill, W. H., & Boggs, K. (1990). Development and validation of the Career Factors Inventory. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 37, Gati, I., Krausz, M., & Osipow, S. H. (1996). A taxonomy of career decision-making difficulties. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 43, Gati, I., Osipow, S. H., Krausz, M., & Saka, N. (in press). Validity of the Career Decision-Making Difficulties Questionnaire. Journal of Vocational Behavior. Gottfredson, G. D., & Holland, J. L. (1996). Dictionary of Holland occupational codes (3rd. ed.). Odessa, FL: Psychological Assessment Resources. Hackett, G. (1993). Career counseling and psychotherapy: False dichotomies and recommended remedies. Journal of Career Assessment, 1, Haraburda, E. M. (1996). Development and validation of multi-domain measures of decision-making self-efficacy and indecisiveness. Unpublished Master s thesis, Columbus, OH: Ohio State University. Haraburda, E. M. (1998). The relationship of indecisiveness to the five factor personality model and psychological symptomology. Unpublished Doctoral dissertation, Columbus, OH: Ohio State University.

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