PERSON RELIABILITY EVALUATED IN THE CONTEXT OF VOCATIONAL-INTEREST ASSESSMENT

This study investigated the theoretical meaning and practical utility of a person reliability index widely used in the context of vocational interest assessment, namely, the within session profile stability index. Ninety-five university students completed the Jackson Vocational Interest Survey (JVIS), the Career Decision Scale, and the WAIS-Clarke Vocabulary Test. They were retested with the JVIS and Career Decision Scale 4-6 weeks later. In addition to within session profile stability, measures of interest crystallization, career certainty, career indecision, and across session person reliability were calculated. The results indicated that person reliability is a unidimensional construct. That is, the within session profile stability index was highly predictive of across session person reliability and moderately related to interest crystallization. Although within session profile stability was unrelated to career decisiveness, its practical utility as a measure of the reliability or stability of an individual's responses to a vocational interest inventory was readily established. © 1990.