Career Adapt-Abilities Scale–Portugal Form: Psychometric properties and relationships to employment status

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Abstract

The Career-Adaptabilities Scale (CAAS)–Portugal Form consists of four scales, each with seven items, which 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 fairly similar to the one computed for combined data from 13 countries. The CAAS–Portugal Form includes all the items in the International Form, and it adds one further national item to each scale. The syntheses of a variety of differential studies are presented to illustrate the importance of an adaptability measure to the field of career construction.

Highlights

► Reports psychometric characteristics of CAAS-Portugal. ► CAAS-Portugal presented a similar factor structure to the one of CSSA-International. ► Unemployed adults exhibited higher levels of concern, control and curiosity than employed ones.

Introduction

Situated on the Iberian Peninsula, Portugal is Europe‘s most westerly situated country. It benefits from an excellent geographical location, being situated in a geographically strategic position between Europe, America, and Africa. Catholicism is the main religion and Portuguese is the official language spoken throughout the country. Portuguese is the fifth most spoken language in the world and the third most spoken in the Western world. Moreover, Portuguese remains the official language of 7 other countries, being spoken by more than 200 million people, and there are Portuguese communities settled around the world (European Commission, 2010).

Pre-primary education is considered as the first step of the education system and is aimed at children aged 3–5 years. This is followed by Primary education, Lower secondary education, Upper secondary education, and Higher education. As of 2009, education is compulsory from 16 to 18 years of age. Students who have reached the age limit for compulsory education and who have not successfully completed the 12th grade may continue their education via other forms of adult education. With regards to legislation, access to education and culture is a legal right of the whole population. The freedom to teach and learn is also ensured (European Commission, 2010). In recent years, Portugal has been making efforts to increase the education and skill level. These efforts are primarily aimed at the qualifications of people presently in the labor market, and intended to enhance competitiveness, economic growth, employment, and improvement of salaries (Agência para o Investimento e Comércio Externo de Portugal, 2011).

Portugal has one of the highest unemployment rates of European Community (12.4), as well as a high level of long-term unemployment. This situation is a result of a labor market that is accompanied by low levels of mobility. Furthermore, Portugal is one of the European countries with the highest level of temporary employment, especially amongst young people. Economic immigration is a relatively recent phenomenon compared to what had taken place in the past, when many Portuguese families would emigrate in search of a better life. Immigration is now helping to sustain the population of the country's labor force, and consequently, is compensating for issues such as the ageing of the population and the increase in life expectancy. The proportion of workers who have completed secondary, post-secondary and tertiary education has increased so that in 2010, 16% of the active population has frequented a higher education establishment (Agência para o Investimento e Comércio Externo de Portugal, 2011).

Similar to other countries, career counselors in Portugal may benefit from the availability of a career adaptability measure. While the CAAS-International Form 2.0 demonstrated excellent reliability and appropriate cross-national measurement equivalence (Savickas & Porfeli, 2012-this issue), its validity for use in Portugal must be addressed through further analysis. The present article describes the CAAS-Portugal Form and reports its psychometric properties, including item statistics and internal consistency estimates. In addition, a comparison is drawn between the factor structure of the CAAS-Portugal and the multidimensional, hierarchical measurement model of the CAAS-International Form 2.0.

Section snippets

Participants

The sample included 916 participants: 255 students from 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th grade, 65% of them attend the 9th grade, with a mean age of 15.04 years (SD = 1.39); 395 employed adults, 64% of which have at least a bachelor degree, with a mean age of 46.62 years (SD = 4.29), and 266 unemployed adults enrolled in training activities, with a mean age of 22.43 years (SD = 8.00). Participants volunteered to complete the CAAS-Portugal as part of a research project. The global sample was composed of 52%

Results

The CAAS-Portugal item means and standard deviations suggest that the typical response was in the range of very strong to strongest (this may be accounted for by an increased answer selection of the two strongest alternatives, representing 76% of all answers). Skewness and kurtosis values for the CAAS-Portugal items ranged from –.72 to 0.04 and −.74 to 0.15, respectively, and for constructs ranged from −.42 to − 0.15 and −.36 to − 0.14, respectively. In both cases most of these statistics

Discussion

Based on the results of the statistical analyses reported herein, we concluded that CAAS-Portugal Form performs similarly to the CAAS-International Form in terms of reliability and factor structure. The total scale and four subscales each demonstrated good to excellent internal consistency estimates and a coherent multidimensional, hierarchical structure that fits the theoretical model and linguistic explanation of career adaptability resources. One of the main differences found consists in

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    Based on the idea that career adaptability bridges the life-span (Savickas, 1997), researchers have collected data in diverse samples, including pre-adolescents, adolescents, adults workers, and retirees. Vocational psychologists from South Africa (Maree, 2012), Belgium (Dries, Esbroeck, Vianen, Cooman, & Pepermans, 2012), France (Pouyaud, Vignoli, Dosnon, & Lellemand, 2012), The Netherlands (Vianen, Klehe, Koen, & Dries, 2012), Iceland (Vilhjálmsdóttir, Kjartansdóttir, Smáradóttir, & Einarsdóttir, 2012), Italy (Di Maggio, Ginevra, Nota, Ferrari, & Soresi, 2015; Soresi, Nota, & Ferrari, 2012), Macau (Tien, Lin, Hsieh, & Jin, 2014) and Portugal (Duarte et al., 2012) have used confirmatory factorial methods and validated CAAS applicability from 13 years old through retirement. Career adaptability resources can be seen as human capital developed from education and life experiences.

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