The Structure of Interests Related to College Course Destinations

Interest measurement approaches to guidance are often used in Australian schools. These approaches assume that the measures are relevant to Australians, that the students are sufficiently mature to express interests that have some degree of stability, and that these interests will bear some relationship to the futures of the students. To investigate the truth of these assumptions, eight cohorts (i.e., groups) of female secondary school students completed the Career Assessment Inventory (CAI; Johansson, 1982). Data were collected 3 years later for each cohort, together with college course desti nations. Multidimensional scaling (MDS) was used to investigate the structure of interests of the students within groups identified by course destination. A three-dimensional solution indicates a strong relationship between interests and course destination using Holland's (1985) vocational theory and an empirical course cluster typology (Elsworth, Harvey-Beavis, Gilding, & Briant, 1986).