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Implications of the articles for interpreting interest inventories: consequential validity and meaning making.

Article Excerpt
Interpretation of interest inventories deepens self-knowledge, promotes career exploration, and assists counselors in understanding a client. This article highlights findings from the studies that appear in this special issue of the journal of Measurement and Evaluation in Counseling and Development, with implications for encouraging clients' flexibility in thinking about their interests and for studying the interpretations from inventories that clients incorporate and apply.

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The five articles in this special issue of the journal of Measurement and Evaluation in Counseling and Development (MECD) have elicited many ideas that we believe are worth sharing. The articles were chosen for their quality and because they address important issues that are not often reported. We offer the following reflections.

Validity is paramount for counselors when interpreting interest inventory scores. The studies in this special issue provide new information about the validity of the inventories that they examine and suggest ideas to use in interpretation. One of the reasons counselors interpret interest inventories is to stimulate exploration and generate ideas for collaborative analysis and meaning making within a process. The articles that appear in the current issue of MECD reveal several possibilities for enriching this exploration process.

First, Savickas and Taber (2006) pointed out that the same individual may receive different RIASEC (i.e., Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, Conventional) profiles on different inventories. In addition, they inferred that the participants' variable responses to items in an interest domain accounted for more of the variance in the individual RIASEC profiles sets than did variation between the interest inventories' scales. Thus, they incorporated Tracey's (2003) "traitedness" construct to explain this, suggesting that some people are more predictable across situations than others because a particular trait may be more relevant to them.

The good news is that traitedness as an explanation for the range of agreement among individuals' RIASEC profiles from five inventories may have potential for linking interests to neural processes, thereby suggesting the challenges facing clients with divergent profiles. Studies such as that of Lieberman, Jarcho, and Satpute (2004) have indicated that self-ratings of descriptors from high and low activity areas arouse distinctive neural networks in some participants who are active in the area. The descriptors are similar to the items in a Strong Interest Inventory (SII; Strong, 1994) Basic Interest Scale. The neural networks differentially activated are associated with implicit self-knowledge processes that appear less amenable to change than the processes activated by self-ratings for low-involvement activities. If traitedness relates to the distinctive arousal patterns, then implicitly high-traited clients would be predicted to readily explore or choose career options from their congruent area but resist considering other areas. Low-traited clients, on the other hand, would be more amenable to reconceptualizing themselves and their options. Because Lieberman et al. have not yet been able to differentiate the participants who are and are not aroused, this link and implications remain speculative pending further research. Developments about traitedness, however, are still worth following because of such possible implications for interpretation.

Nevertheless, the current prospect that some clients' high theme scores on two inventories will be at opposite points...