Manifest Anxiety and Vocational Preference among Male Graduate Students

Abstract

Holland (1966) has asserted that most people can be categorized as being one of six personality types with corresponding environments: Realistic, Intellectual, Social, Conventional, Enterprising, and Artistic. According to Holland's theoretical formulations, each environment is dominated by a given type of personality wherein individuals search for vocations that will lead to fulfillment of their needs. Relatively little research has been concerned with the relationship between anxiety per se and vocational choice; however, some implications may be drawn from the existing literature. Steiner and Vannoy (1966) found that the Manifest Anxiety Scale (MAS) was positively correlated with conformity which persisted in the absence of social pressure. More recently Hountras and Scharf (1970) reported that Ss who were external in locus of control were significantly more anxious than were Ss who were internal. The research might be interpreted to suggest that the intellectual personality types might be less anxious, with conventional, artistic, and realistic types being more anxious. Ss were 145 randomly selected male graduate students at the University of North Dakota who were drawn from 18 departments and grouped into Holland's six classifications. Ss were administered the forced-choice MAS (Heineman, 1953) and Holland's (1965) Vocational Preference Inventory (VPI). No significant differences were found among the six personality types (P = 2.11, p > .05). The artistic group had the highest mean (27.74) and the social group had the lowest mean (23.17). The groups expected to be more anxious were the three most anxious groups; however, the intellectual group was only slightly less anxious than these three groups. The relationship of anxiety to the VPI scales showed only slight correlations. The largest correlation of -.I5 occurred with the Enterprising scale. It seems reasonable to conclude that anxiety, as measured by the forcedchoice version of the Manifest Anxiety Scale, is not related to the vocational choices of males in graduate school as measured by Holland's scale. This might mean that graduate school might be seen as a relatively homogeneous work environment for the six vocational types. If future research shows that differing amounts of anxiety are found for different work environments. the difference might be due to the environments themselves rather than