Development and initial validation of brief public domain RIASEC marker scales

Although commercially developed interest measures based on Holland’s RIASEC types are effectively used in a variety of applied settings, these measures have somewhat limited research utility due to their length and copyright restrictions placed by the test publishers. In the present study, two sets of 8-item RIASEC scales were developed using activity-based items selected from the 30-item RIASEC scales of the Interest Profiler, and two sets of 8-item RIASEC scales were developed using sets of 30 occupational job titles selected from the O∗NET database representing each Holland type. Responses to the items were obtained from three samples of college students with a total of 1024 female and 639 male participants. Results obtained in the initial development and validation process suggest that the sets of brief activity- and occupational-based RIASEC scales developed in the current study retain acceptable levels of reliability and convergent validity. The development of these brief public domain RIASEC interest measures addresses the copyright and length limitations of current scales and may be useful when conducting integrative research examining the inter-relations between Holland’s types and other individual differences measures.