Motivational Correlates of Portuguese High Schoolers’ Vocational Identity: Cultural Validation of the Goal Instability Scale

Abstract

This study examined the relevance of the Goal Instability Scale-Portuguese Adaptation (GIS-P) on the vocational identity and career certainty of 375 10th-, 11th-, and 12th-grade Portuguese high schoolers. After translating the GIS-P, confirmatory factor analysis was used to examine the factorial unidimensionality and reliability of the construct. A multitrait-monomethod correlation matrix demonstrated convergent and divergent validity with personality, career, and social constructs. As expected, the GIS-P was a stronger predictor of vocational identity than global self-esteem and differentiated those students with postsecondary plans from those who were uncertain about their plans. This research supports the cultural relevance of the goal instability construct and of motivational determinants of academic and career adjustment with Portuguese students.

The Career Commitment of Contingent Workforce in Semiconductor Industry

“…Goal instability as a motivational personality construct reflecting the self's ability to organize itself through coherent and solid goals and to muster the energy to act on them [18]. This study of contingent employees in Taiwan semiconductor industry demonstrates that goal stability acts as a proxy for the self's ability to mobilize itself into career commitment.…”

“…Internal consistency is 0.81 [19]. Confirmatory factor analyses using diverse age groups have shown the GIS taps a unitary construct [18,24]. A six-point Likert-type scale ranging from "strongly disagree" to "strongly agree" is also adopted.…”

“…Goal instability derives from the psychology of the self (Kohut, 1977(Kohut, , 1984) -a comprehensive model of personality bases on the notion that the organizing center of the personality contains self-structures that set direction and provide initiative [18]. The Goal Instability Scale (GIS; [19]) measures individual variation in specific areas of goaldirectedness including self-confusion, inhibitions in initiating activities, and a lack of orienting goals for organizing one's actions.…”

Test Adaptation and Cross-Cultural Assessment From a Business Perspective: Issues and Recommendations

“…For those measures for which establishing some sort of equivalence across different language versions was crucial, participants relied on the existing literature on methods that can assist test developers to approximate equivalence. These methods tend to comprise factor analytic techniques, especially confirmatory factor analysis (e.g., Ben Porath, 1990;Santos, Casillas, & Robbins, 2004), as well as analyses using item response theory, such as differential item functioning (e.g., Allalouf, Hambleton, & Sireci, 1999;Ellis, 1989;Ercikan, 2002).…”

A Kohutian approach to indecisiveness

“…In this study, we used the Portuguese version of the GIS adapted by Santos, Casillas and Robbins (2004), with a sample of secondary school students. A confirmatory factor analysis indicated that the GIS assesses one single factor.…”