The Career Distress Scale

Abstract

Career distress is a common and painful outcome of many negative career experiences, such as career indecision, career compromise, and discovering career barriers. However, there are very few scales devised to assess career distress, and the two existing scales identified have psychometric weaknesses. The absence of a practical, validated scale to assess this construct restricts research related to career distress and limits practitioners who need to assess and treat it. Using a sample of 226 young adults (mean age 20.5 years), we employed item response theory to assess 12 existing career distress items for model fit, item bias, location dependency, dimensionality, reliability, response option suitability, and construct validity. Three of the 12 items examined were removed as they did not fit the Rasch model or were not invariant across groups. The remaining 9 items, which we combined into a scale labeled the Career Distress Scale, demonstrated excellent psychometric properties, meaning that both researchers and practitioners can use it with confidence. Continued validation is required, including testing its relationship to other nomological net variables, testing predictive validity, and assessing test–retest reliability.

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