Career Adapt-Abilities Scale — Korea Form: Psychometric properties and construct validity

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Abstract

The Career Adapt-Abilities Scale (CAAS) — Korea Form consists of four subscales, each with six items. The subscales measure concern, control, curiosity, and confidence as psychosocial resources for managing occupational transitions, developmental tasks, and work traumas. Internal consistency estimates for the subscale and total scores ranged from good to excellent. The factor structure was quite similar to the one computed for combined data from 13 countries. The CAAS Korea Form is identical to the International Form 2.0.

Highlights

► The Career Adapt-Abilities Scale (CAAS) — Korea Form was developed. ► Internal consistency estimates for the subscale and total scores ranged from good to excellent. ► The factor structure was quite similar to the one computed for combined data from 13 countries. ► The CAAS — Korea Form is identical to the International Form 2.0.

Introduction

Korea has been one of the major fast growing countries in Asia. Since the major economic crisis in 1997, the labor force has gone through a severe and dramatic change. During that period of time, many employees were forced to leave their companies involuntarily. Since then, most companies do not guarantee long-term tenure, and many people come to believe that they can be forced to leave their companies anytime. Recently unemployment among young people has been a major problem in Korea. In 2011, the unemployment rate for young people was almost 10%, which is the largest since the economic crisis. In this situation, getting a job has become a major concern among college students and high school graduates who wish to enter the labor market. Thus, career adaptability appears to be one of the major career issues for most people in Korea. In order for counselors and coaches to assess clients' adaptability and intervene to increase it, they need a sound psychometric inventory.

To measure career adaptability among students and working adults, an international team constructed the Career Adapt-Abilities Scale—International Form 2.0 (CA-AS). The measure has demonstrated excellent reliability and appropriate cross-national measurement equivalence (Savickas & Porfeli, 2012-this issue), nevertheless its validity for use in Korea needs to be addressed by further analysis. The present article describes the CAAS—Korea Form and reports its psychometric properties, including item statistics and internal consistency estimates. In addition, the research compared the factor structure of the CAAS—Korea to the multi-dimensional, hierarchical measurement model of the CAAS—International.

Section snippets

Participants

Participants were recruited from classes in introductory psychology. The instructor explained the purpose of the survey and promised confidentiality. The group of participants who volunteered to complete the scale consisted of 278 college students with a mean age of 21.6 years (SD = 2.53). All of the students were Korean, with 63% male and 37% female. Participants completed the CAAS—Korea during class time.

Career Adapt-Abilities Inventory—Korea Form

The CAAS—International Form 2.0 contains 24 items that combine to form a total score which

Results

The CAAS—Korea item means and standard deviations suggest that the typical response was in the range of strong to very strong. Skewness and kurtosis values for the CAAS—Korea items ranged from −.79 to .03 and −.61 to .33 respectively, suggesting that the items conform to the assumptions of confirmatory factor analysis for this sample. Scale means and standard deviations for the CAAS—Korea appear in Table 1. Skewness and kurtosis values for the CAAS—Korea constructs ranged from −.45 to −.13 and −

Discussion

Based on the results of the statistical analyses reported herein, we concluded that the CAAS—Korea performs quite similarly to the CAAS—International in terms of psychometric characteristics and factor structure. The total scale and four subscales each demonstrate good to excellent internal consistency estimates and a coherent multidimensional, hierarchical structure that fits the theoretical model and linguistic explication of career adaptability resources. These results should bolster

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