Validity, structure, and content of the 1994 Strong Interest Inventory

The relative contributions of the personal style scales, general occupational themes, and basic interest scales to the concurrent validity, predictive structure, and personality content of the 1994 Strong Interest Inventory were studied. Effect sizes were provided to indicate the overall differentiation between occupational groups for each of the 35 scales. An expected inverse relationship between the predictive power;of each of the 3 sets of nonoccupational scales and their occupational specificity was found. Vocational measures of personality represented by the personal style scales and general occupational themes were found to be effective in a familiar hexagonal 2-dimensional space. Although the results supported the incremental validity of the personal style scales, the basic interest scales were found to deal most effectively with the multivariate complexity of vocational interests.