Strong Interest Inventory

The Strong Interest Inventory (SII) is an interest inventory used in career assessment. As such, career assessments may be used in career counseling. The goal of this assessment is to give insight into a person's interests, so that they may have less difficulty in deciding on an appropriate career choice for themselves. It is also frequently used for educational guidance as one of the most popular career assessment tools. The test was developed in 1927 by psychologist Edward Kellog Strong, Jr. to help people exiting the military find suitable jobs. It was revised later by Jo-Ida Hansen and David Campbell. The modern version of 2004 is based on the Holland Codes typology of psychologist John L. Holland. The Strong is designed for high school students, college students, and adults, and was found to be at about the ninth-grade reading level.

Before he created the inventory, Strong was the head of the Bureau of Educational Research at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. Strong attended a seminar at the Carnegie Institute of Technology where a man by the name of Clarence S. Yoakum introduced the use of questionnaires in differentiating between people of various occupations. This later sparked Strong's interest in developing a better way of measuring people's occupational interests. Starting off as the "Strong Vocational Interest Blank", the name changed when the test was revised in 1974 to the Strong-Campbell Interest Inventory. Today we call it the Strong Interest Inventory. The inventory has been revised six times over the years to reflect continued development in the field.

Strong based his empirical approach on the idea that interests were on a dimension of liking to disliking that could be used to discriminate among various occupational groups. In other words, Strong developed several scales that contrasted groups of people, based on their answers. This method of scaling, developed by Strong, has been very influential and has been used in several different questionnaires, including the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI).

Strong's original Inventory had 10 occupational scales. The original Inventory was created with men in mind, so in 1933 Strong came out with a women's form of the Strong Vocational Blank. In 1974 when the Strong-Campbell Interest Inventory came out, Campbell had combined both the men's and the women's forms into a single form. Other improvements that Campbell made to earlier versions include: the use of 124 occupational scales, the continued use of 23 Basic Interest Scales, and the addition of 2 special scales to measure academic comfort and introversion/extroversion dimensions.

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