Validity of the Career Decision-Making Difficulties Questionnaire: Counselee versus Career Counselor Perceptions

Abstract

In order to examine the validity of the Career Decision-making Difficulties Questionnaire (CDDQ), we obtained the CDDQ responses of 95 career counselees as well as their career counselors' judgments of their counselees' career decision-making difficulties. The structure of the decision-making difficulty categories of the CDDQ was similar to that proposed by Gati, Krausz, and Osipow (1996). Also, when compared with a general sample of 259 young adults, counselees reported significantly fewer difficulties related to lack of motivation, but more difficulties in six other categories. As hypothesized, the median correlation between the 10 scale scores of the counselees and the respective judgments of their counselors across the 10 difficulty categories was positive: .37 for all counselee–counselor pairs and .49 for those 68 pairs where the variance of both the CDDQ scale scores and the counselor's judgments exceeded 1.0 (on a 9-point scale). Counselors and counselees agreed more strongly about difficulties related to Readiness for the career decision-making process and Inconsistent Information than about difficulties related to Lack of Information.