Vocational Maturity under Scrutiny
Abstract
<p>THIS volume is a research monograph, the second in a projected series of publications of the Career Pattern Study being conducted by the Horace Mann-Lincoln Institute of School Experimentation. The basic goal of the Career Pattern Study is to conceptualize the field of vocational development, and the purpose of the phase of the study reported in this monograph is to examine the usefulness of certain hypothetical constructs as bases for the development of measures of vocational maturity.</p><p>The study utilized interviews, questionnaires, rating scales, school records, and tests of 142 boys in the ninth-grade class of Middletown High School of Middletown, New York, during 1951–1952.</p><p>Five dimensions of vocational maturity with 20 subdivisions or indices (each in turn broken down into further subdivisions) were developed as constructs on an a prori basis by the research staff to form the basis for measuring vocational maturity. The rationale for constructing indices of vocational maturity was derived from developmental psychology's principles of differentiation, realism, and independence. The focus of the study was that of determination of the interrelationship of these twenty indices, for it was supposed that all measures of vocational maturity should hang together in intercorrelations.</p><p>Six indices were judged to have sufficiently