Assessing the Structure of Vocational Interests among Bolivian University Students

Abstract

Ninety-eight Bolivian university students completed the Spanish version of Holland's Self-Directed Search. The fit of three different structural models of vocational interest (Holland's [1973] circumplex, Gati's [1979] three group partition, and Rounds and Tracey's [in press] three group partition) were fit to the correlations among the RIASEC scales using the randomization test of hypothesized order relations (Hubert & Arabie, 1987). Nonsignificant probabilities and low correspondence indices were obtained for all three models. These results indicate poor model fit, suggesting that none of these models adequately characterize the structure of vocational interests of the Bolivian students sampled. Multidimensional scaling was used to depict the structure of the Bolivian sample's vocational interests in two dimensions.