Group 1 – Strong interest inventory (Myers-Briggs)

Contents to be covered:
1. Theory behind the assessment
2. Test details (format, no. of questions, etc)
3. Sample report/analysis
4. Psychometric properties (reliability and validity)

Presentation guidelines: 10 minutes ppt + 5 mins Q&A.

Puja

Hello everyone we are group number 1. The group consists of Abinash, Devendra, Lavanyaa,
Portia, Rajarshi, Sarbjeet, and myself Puja. We are going to present on the topic of the Strong
interest inventory (Myers-Briggs). Just think whether people are interested in things they do well
or do they develop abilities in areas that interest them. Before jumping into the discussion and
the topic let’s start with a small video about this.

Video - 1 min 45 sec

The Strong Interest Inventory provides robust insights into a person’s career interests, helping
them to discover potential career paths they may not have considered, and giving them a wealth
of information about how they approach the world of work. Employers also can use information
about their employee's interest patterns to formulate job descriptions and attract new
employees. Even though there are many instruments designed to measure interests, our
discussion focuses on the one with the longest history of continuous use, the Strong Interest
Inventory. The test was developed in 1927 by psychologist Edward Kellog strong Jr. To help
people exiting the military find suitable jobs.

Strong's recipe for test construction was empirical and straightforward

1) Select hundreds of items that could conceivably distinguish the interests of a person by
that person's occupations
2) Administer this rough cut of the test to several hundred people selected as
representative of certain occupations
3) Sort out which items seemed of interest to persons by occupational group and discard
items with no discriminative ability
4) Construct a final version of the test that would yield scores describing how an
examinee’s pattern of interest corresponded to those of people actually employed in
various professions.

The newly revised inventory consists of 291 items that measure an individual's interest in six areas:

Area Number of Questions in Each Area

Occupations 107
Subject Areas 46
Activities 85
Leisure Activities 28
People 16
Your Characteristics 9

The first 282 items are answered by the examinee choosing one of the following options:
"strongly like", "like", "indifferent", "dislike", or "strongly dislike" while the remaining 9 items in the
"Your Characteristics" section are answered the same way but with different options including:
"strongly like me", "like me", "don’t know", "unlike me", or "strongly unlike me".[9] It is an
assessment of interests, and not to be confused with personality assessments or aptitude tests.

Devendra

The Strong Interest Inventory test is an assessment that helps people match their interests with
potential educational, career, using an individual’s preferences. Each career option has a set of
interest themes associated with them. Based on test takers' answers (and the answers of those
surveyed when the assessment was updated), you will score higher or lower on those scales.
Also important are the patterns between your likes and dislikes, and what they mean when
looked at altogether. One important thing is The Strong Inventory measures interests, not skills
or abilities, and that the results can help guide you toward rewarding careers based on just your
interests.

The Test is broken down into four categories

1. General Occupational Themes Describes your interests, work activities, potential
skills, and personal values in six broad areas: Realistic (R), Investigative (I), Artistic (A),
Social (S), Enterprising (E), and Conventional (C).

2. Basic Interest Scales Identifies specific interests, indicating areas likely to be most
motivating and rewarding for you.

3. Occupational Scales Compares your likes and dislikes with those of people who are
satisfied working in various occupations

4. Personal Style Scales Describes preferences related to work style, learning,

leadership, risk taking, and environments most likely to fit you best

The information gathered from these scales comes together to provide you with a picture of
where your interests lie and which jobs or school majors match these interests.
Lavanyaa

So after giving the test, we get a detailed report with the results intended to guide the test taker
toward rewarding careers, work activities, education programs, and leisure activities—all based
on your interests. These are snippets from a sample report taken from the official website.

For example, Let’s take a look at OCCUPATIONAL SCALES. This section highlights your Profile
results on the Occupational Scales of the Strong. On the pages, we can find the scores for 130
occupations, with the 10 occupations most closely aligned with your interests listed in the
summary.

So the Similar results are with the score of (40 and above), with which You share interests in
that occupation and probably would enjoy the work.

Midrange results are with scores between (30–39), and you share some interests in that
occupation. Lastly, Dissimilar results (29 and below) , You share few interests in that occupation
and probably would not enjoy the work.

The profile summary sums up the strong interest areas for all 4 categories, in addition to the
detailed description provided in the previous sections.

Now, Portia will take it forward.

Portia
Having confidence in clinical tools means that they measure what they are intended to measure
(validity), they are stable over time (reliability) and can detect changes in conditions .
Collectively, they are called looking at the psychometric properties.

But is this theory valid ?

● Studies have found the GOTs to be predictive of work-related variables.
● Also the BISs can accurately distinguish occupations.
● Validity of the PSSs has been supported through research showing their relationships
with the Skills Confidence Inventory and MBTI instruments.
● Validity of the OSs has been demonstrated in research showing their ability to predict the
occupations that people will eventually enter.

Coming to Reliability -
According to one of the studies and the data provided in it, it was seen that over short-term time
periods, the test-retest reliabilities for four samples ranged from 0.74 to 0.92. Alpha reliability for
the General Occupational Themes were reported at 0.90 to 0.94, 0.74 to 0.94 for Basic Interest
Scales, and none was reported for Occupational Scales. A correlation score of 0.77 was
calculated between the General Occupational Themes and the Vocational Preference Inventory
Scales which supported the theory’s reliability.