More test items in the public domain

Development and initial validation of public domain Basic Interest Markers

In the most recent version of the Journal of Vocational Behavior (JVB), Liao, Armstrong, and Rounds developed and validated a pool of public domain vocational interest items. This research was inspired by Goldberg’s International Personality Item Pool (IPIP) – a widely-used public domain personality item pool developed to encourage personality research. Liao and colleagues contend that creating a pool of public-domain interest items would advance the science of interest measurement by making items instantly accessible at no cost for graduate students and others with limited financial means. They organized interest items into Basic Interest Scales called Basic Interest Markers (BIMs) based on research supporting the utility of this type of organizing structure. Basic Interest Scales group items according to homogeneous content areas that capture various related job titles. The study details the methods by which the 343 items and 31 BIM scales were generated and present validity evidence based on correlations with the Strong Interest Inventory (SII), and discriminant validity evidence based on the ability of BIMs to differentiate between 12 major fields of education and training programs. This work and the corresponding website:
https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/jrounds/IIP/home.htm
should serve to stimulate research in the career interest domain. However, it also has potential negative implications for test publishers who sell career interest measures. Specifically, some argue that these types of item pools have the potential to compromise the utility and integrity of published, commercially available tests.

View full abstract/get the article at:

https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/hliao/web/Liao_JVB_08inpress.pdf