This chapter presents a broad overview of the procedures implemented to develop the Career Personality Test. The information is provided at a fairly basic level of technical detail to give the wide range of its users an introduction to the test's technical underpinnings.

Goals of the Project. Four primary goals served as the basis for the development process of the Career Personality Test:

1. Develop an instrument with strong technical characteristics that would provide users with accurate and useful information.
   
   
2. Develop a fair and unbiased instrument that would serve the needs of users from a variety of ethnic, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Every effort was made to ensure that the instrument would be helpful to users with different backgrounds.
   
   
3. Develop an instrument that is reasonably consistent with the typological models that guidance counselors have grown accustomed to. This would help ensure that the instrument would not require a significant amount of counselor retraining in order to be effectively administered by guidance counselors.
   
   
4. Develop an instrument that could be used as a self-assessment tool that individuals could easily self-administer and self-interpret. This self-assessment instrument would help empower users to take control of their own career exploration efforts. Of course, the instrument could also be used by counselors with users in a one-on-one or group setting.

In the end, researchers at MyPlan.com determined that the choice itself of a psychometric model would not greatly impact the career profiling and career matching phases of research so long as the scales of the chosen model had reasonably strong discriminant value. Carl Jung’s eight personality types were selected, then, as the underlying model for the MyPlan.com Career Personality Test on the basis of three factors:

1. A significant amount of literature already existed in the public domain about Jung’s eight personality types (at least 400 books have been published on Jung’s typological model). These could be used by counselors and test-takers alike to supplement their understanding of the personality types presented in the Career Personality Test report.
   
   
2. Most guidance counselors were already fluent in the language of Jungian types and could readily describe the differences between personality types. In fact, many could even distinguish the 16 composite, dominant preferences and often used terms like “INTJ” as if they were adjectives in describing people.
   
   
3. Various studies over the past half century have confirmed that Jungian types do, in fact, discriminate populations predictably. Regardless of what archetypes were finally chosen, as long as they exhibited reasonably strong discriminant power on bipolar scales, they could be extended into the development of career profiles and ultimately into career matching.

A team of three writers was trained in Jung’s personality theory and archetypal model. Each writer was tasked with writing new questions that met the following criteria: (1) clearly expressed one of Jung’s four dichotomies without overtly exposing the underlying model; (2) presented choices within the Jungian construct that were presumed to be equally acceptable in the greater population; (3) would consequently elicit an endorsement rate that falls between 10 percent and 90 percent; (4) were inoffensive to individuals and subgroups; (5) contained vocabulary comprehensible to individuals with an eighth grade reading level; (6) would likely reduce spurious gender and race/ethnic endorsement rate differences; and (7) would be familiar to individuals from a variety of settings, including a.) entry level and career transition counseling settings, b.) urban, rural, and suburban settings, and c.) nationwide regional settings. All new questions were reviewed and edited by the team of writers. After this phase, a pool of 127 new questions existed, representing 254 personality preference items.

The pool of 127 original questions underwent a comprehensive screening process designed to remove questions that failed to meet rigorous standards for inclusion in the Career Personality Test. Each question, composed of two option items, was required to pass the six screens presented below to be included in the next phase of instrument development.

Retranslation. This screen was conducted to ensure that items truly represented their intended archetypal construct. Four expert judges in Jung’s personality theory received a copy of 254 randomly-ordered items (from all 127 newly authored questions) with no indication of the construct or personality type each item was intended to represent. Judges independently assigned each item to one of Jung’s eight personality types. Following the assignment task, judges discussed assignment differences and recommended item alterations, edits and/or deletions. Questions were retained only if each of the paired options were both independently validated by all three judges.

Sensitivity. The purpose of this screening was to ensure that questions would not be offensive to particular segments of the potential user population. A panel of five individuals representing diverse race/ethnic and gender groups was convened. The protocol for the screen was derived from guidelines developed by the Educational Testing Service (1987), along with a review of the sensitivity procedures used in the development of the O*NET Ability Profiler (Mellon, Daggett, MacManus, & Moritsch, 1996). Panel members reviewed each question for possible bias against or offensiveness to racial, ethnic, or gender groups. The panel concluded with a short list of suggested item revisions and deletions that were incorporated within the item pool.

Comprehensibility. The estimated range of education for potential users of the Career Personality Test begins at the junior high school level; thus, questions must be comprehensible to these users. An eighth grade reading level was selected as the goal for the questions. The Living Word Vocabulary (Dale & O’Rourke, 1981) was used to determine the grade level appropriateness of the vocabulary present in each question. Two sets of inspectors independently identified the grade level assigned to all words present in the pool of questions.

All questions with words exceeding an eighth grade level were identified. For each of these questions, one of the following actions was taken: (1) inappropriate grade-level words were replaced with synonyms with a lower grade-level designation; (2) questions were entirely rewritten; or (3) alterations of the questions were overruled by the team of four expert judges.

Duplication. The purpose of this screening was to eliminate items with identical or nearly identical content. Four expert judges reviewed the pool of questions and items to ensure that nearly identical items were not present. For example, “I tend to be expressive and talkative” and “Others might describe me as being talkative” would be considered nearly identical, and only one would be retained.

Copyright. To avoid copyright infringement, potential Career Personality Test questions were compared to questions widely used in existing personality instruments. Questions were compared with those in the (1) Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI) Form M version (Consulting Psychologists Press Inc., 1998) and (2) Keirsey Temperament Sorter II® (AdvisorTeam.com, Inc. 2003). Two inspectors independently identified any questions that might be perceived to be similar or near duplicate. Agreement between the inspectors was extremely high. Those items that represented potential copyright infringements were removed.

Construct Representation. This screening was conducted to ensure that there were roughly an equal number of questions representing each of the four scales. Originally, for example, the Judging-Perceiving scale had 9 more questions than the Sensing-Intuiting scale. Four expert judges were tasked with removing questions from over-represented constructs in order to balance out the number of questions from each of the four scales.

46 questions failed to pass the six-stage screening process, resulting in a pool of 81 questions (from an original pool of 127 questions). A pilot study was conducted to gather further information on the psychometric characteristics of the 81 remaining questions. This information would serve to identify those questions most likely to yield a test with high reliability, low gender and race/ethnic biases, and strong evidence of construct validity.

The pilot instrument was administered to 212 individuals from a variety of backgrounds (e.g., age, education, employment status) living in Southern California. 52% of respondents were in college, 20% were in high school, and 28% were in careers.

Question & Scale Analyses. A set of general statistical screens were conducted to eliminate questions with extremely low and high endorsement rates, questions with large differences in endorsements between males and females, questions with large differences among racial/ethnic groups, and questions that did not correlate highly with their intended scale (questions were eliminated if they correlated less with their target scale than with another scale). A pool of 68 questions was retained after these screens.

Final Instrument. With 68 remaining questions, a team of four experts in Jungian theory was again assembled to finalize the selection of questions. It was determined that 60 questions would be included in the final instrument, representing 15 questions from each of the four personality scales. In order to meet this goal, one “T-F” question, four “E-I” questions and five “J-P” questions needed to be removed. The four judges reviewed question-scale correlations, identified any further possible redundancies, and recommended their final 60 questions.