3.3: Quantitative Assessment Approaches
Quantitative assessment is used here to refer to standardized approaches to career assessment. These typically refer to interest or aptitude assessments. Most have been developed using some rigorous approach to test construction; they employ the standardization of administrative processes and have been subjected to various validity and reliability assessments.
Interest measures are mostly used to determine the client’s interests by asking a client about their preferences or presenting them with a scenario-based question. Examples of interest measures include approaches such as the Self-Directed Search, the Career Occupational Preference System, and the Strong Interest Inventory.
Aptitude assessments are used to ascertain the client’s abilities and match their strengths to certain careers. Approaches to aptitude assessment include the General Aptitude Test Battery, the Differential Aptitude Tests, and the Career Ability Placement Survey.
Measures of values are used to determine the client’s essential values and match their beliefs with suitable careers. Value assessments include approaches such as the Career Orientation Placement and Evaluation Survey and the Career Values Scale.
Some of the more popular quantitative exploration strategies include personality or type and temperament scales. These tests are used to determine the client’s personality and temperament and recommend career choices based on the results. Examples include the Myers Briggs Type Indicator, the DISC profile, and Personality Dimensions.
Career tests, often used in educational and career counselling settings, aim to help individuals identify occupations and educational paths that match their interests. However, a body of research critiques these tests’ effectiveness, reliability, and validity. Key weaknesses include their oversimplification of career decision-making, cultural bias, reliance on self-reported data, and the dynamic nature of the workforce, which these tests may not fully capture.
First-hand Experience
Early in my career, I had experiences with clients that caused me to step back and consider the validity of the quantitative assessment process. Two issues occurred that gave me concern. First, I had multiple clients coming in who had already completed a series of career tests and were still struggling with what they needed to do. In other words, no formal assessment had helped them clarify their decision-making.
The second issue that came up frequently was that I would encounter people who had used formal quantitative career assessments but did not understand the context of the test and, hence, were not clear about the results. In most cases the individuals had taken a formal test but did not understand what it meant and misinterpreted the meaning of the results. I found myself having to guide them through a reinterpretation of the material to help them make sense of it. I found that it could take significant time to turn around a person’s misconception about the results of the formal assessment.
One of the things I notice more than anything else with clients is that formal or quantitative assessments often seem to have what I would call a placebo effect. Clients would take a formal test and, at the end of it, identify a particular aspect of that test that would help them to confirm a bias they had about what they should do. In other words, rather than providing an open source of consideration, the test reconfirmed preference bias.
Preference bias is like wearing glasses that only let you see what you already believe. It happens when we pay more attention to information that supports our ideas and ignore anything that disagrees with our perceptions. For example, if your client thinks that being a chef is the best job ever, they might notice all the cool cooking shows, delicious recipes, and successful chefs but ignore stories about chefs working long hours or struggling to find jobs.
I have often heard individuals say things like, “I know I’m the right person for this career because when you look at this test, it says I’m ‘outgoing;’ therefore, I should be a ‘salesperson.’
Significant challenges regarding using quantitative assessments are identified in career research literature. The most significant issue is whether they help a person predict fit in a future career choice. This is impacted by the challenge of how difficult it is to measure “fit” and the fact that the workplace is dynamic and changing.
One of the most widely used and most researched quantitative approaches has questionable connections between its measurements and what people in actual jobs are like. In the late fifties John Holland, an American psychologist introduced the concept that there were six categories of personality, and each category was drawn to a particular career environment. However, Magnusson, K., & Stewin, L. (1990) found weak correlations between a person’s Holland Code and those who worked in occupations. It turns out that human interests are much more complex than many career theorists and researchers thought.
The article “Do Ornithologists Flock Together? Examining the Homogeneity of Interests in Occupations” (Nye, C.D., Perlus, J.G. and Rounds J., 2018) explored the concept of homogeneity of interest within occupations, challenging the foundational assumption that individuals in the same occupation share similar interest profiles. It investigated this by examining Strong Interest Inventory data and a quantitative review of congruence indices, revealing significant heterogeneity of interests across various occupations. This finding suggests a continuum of interest homogeneity exists, prompting a reevaluation of the assumption that occupations comprise individuals with homogeneous interests. The study underscored the importance of reconsidering the role of interest homogeneity in career planning and employee selection, highlighting the complexity of person-environment fit in vocational and organizational research.
These concerns suggest that we must be very careful about quantitative approaches into the assessment and exploration process as career professionals. Let’s look at the qualitative assessment approaches in the next section.
A quantitative assessment used to determine the client's interests by presenting them with scenario-based questions.
A quantitative assessment used to ascertain a client's abilities and match their strengths to specific careers.
A quantitative assessment used to determine the client's values and match them to suitable careers.
The use of standardized tests to assess things such as career interests or aptitudes.
