Peoples’ values and the importance they assign to their life roles have long been viewed as important factors in career choice and development. In particular this is true of values, which have received considerable attention already within the traditional, trait-oriented approaches to career planning. Early approaches have emphasised values as person variables that influence individuals’ career choice and development. Traditionally, vocational guidance was seen primarily as a process of helping individuals to match their personal traits with those required by occupations in order to enhance their satisfactoriness and satisfaction. By applying the matching paradigm, the vocational guidance practitioners assisted their clients in choosing the appropriate career track, that is, the one that was believed to be well matched or congruent with the client’s traits. The traits used for matching have changed, however, over the years. In the beginning, during the first decades of the 20th century, abilities (what a person can do) and interest (what a person likes to do) were used as matching variables. Later, in the 1950s, work values (what a person considers important in working) were added as the third matching variable.
The main objective of this chapter is to examine the methodological issues connected with the measurement of values and role salience and to review representative measures that have been used in their assessment. Before that, however, the conceptualisation of the basic constructs addressed in this chapter must be examined.
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Šverko, B., Babarović, T., Šverko, I. (2008). Assessment of Values and Role Salience. In: Athanasou, J.A., Van Esbroeck, R. (eds) International Handbook of Career Guidance. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6230-8_27
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