Vocational interests and career indecision in Switzerland and Burkina Faso: Cross-cultural similarities and differences

Abstract

The Personal Globe Inventory (PGI) and the Career Decision-Making Difficulties Questionnaire (CDDQ) have been adapted to be used in various languages and cultural contexts. However, French versions of these instruments have never been used in Africa and only very few studies have formally studied their cross-cultural replicability. Moreover, no studies have analyzed if the relationship between career interests and decision-making difficulties might be stable across cultures. For this reason, 413 Swiss students and adult workers and 287 Burkinabe students completed both the PGI and the CDDQ. Randomization tests and a series of confirmatory factor analyses supported the structural validity and replicability across the two countries of both the PGI and the CDDQ. Although CDDQ's scales reached scalar invariance across cultures, this was not the case for the scales of the PGI, which reached only metric invariance, suggesting that country-specific norms should be used for this inventory. However, both instruments reached scalar invariance with regard to gender. Gender differences were larger for interests than for career decision-making difficulties within each country sample. Finally, the associations between vocational interests and the CDDQ were small and significant in some cases only in Switzerland. Overall, this study shows that the structure of vocational interests and career indecision seem to replicate well across very different cultures.