The Career Field Preference Questionnaire for Psychology Students<\/strong> (known in its original Spanish designation as the Cuestionario de Preferencias de Campos Profesionales Para Estudiantes de Psicolog\u00eda<\/em>, or CPsy<\/strong>) is an empirical psychometric instrument designed to assess the occupational preferences, vocational inclinations, and domain-specific affinities of undergraduate and graduate psychology students. Developed by Mariana Varela-Jaramillo, Santiago Ram\u00edrez Caste\u00f1eda, Andrea Santacruz, and Fernando Riveros Munevar at the Universidad de La Sabana<\/a> in 2023, the instrument was conceived to address a longstanding challenge in higher education: the high degree of vocational heterogeneity, domain ambiguity, and sub-disciplinary specialization within the broad discipline of psychological science. The CPsy evaluates vocational orientation through an integrated tripartite model comprising domain-specific interests<\/em>, perceived abilities<\/em>, and congruent personality traits<\/em> across nine distinct professional domains: (1) Clinical and Health Psychology, (2) Organizational and Work Psychology, (3) Marketing and Consumer Psychology, (4) Neuropsychology, (5) Sports Psychology, (6) Forensic and Legal Psychology, (7) Educational and Developmental Psychology, (8) Basic and Experimental Psychology (Research Methodology), and (9) Social and Community Psychology.<\/p>\n The scale development protocol initiated with an exhaustive theoretical review and an initial item pool of 134 items, which was submitted to a rigorous qualitative and quantitative content validity assessment by expert judges using Lawshe\u2019s Content Validity Index (modified by Trist\u00e1n-L\u00f3pez, 2008), yielding an intermediate 117-item version. Following administration to a sample of collegiate psychology students across Colombian universities (aged 18 to 39 years), exploratory factor analysis (EFA) demonstrated a well-defined nine-factor structure with clean item loadings and no cross-loadings, resulting in a finalized 94-item self-report questionnaire explaining 58.8% of the total variance. The measurement model demonstrated acceptable goodness-of-fit indices (Comparative Fit Index [CFI] = 0.899, Tucker-Lewis Index [TLI] = 0.870, and Root Mean Square Error of Approximation [RMSEA] = 0.049). Internal consistency analyses demonstrated exceptional psychometric precision, with total scale reliability indices ranging from α = 0.913 to 0.993, and individual subscale coefficients spanning from α = 0.846 to 0.973. The CPsy stands as a robust, culturally validated measurement tool with extensive utility in university vocational counseling, curricular advising, and higher education retention research<\/span>.<\/p>\n Career Field Preferences, Psychology Students, Vocational Guidance, Clinical and Health Psychology, Organizational and Work Psychology, Educational and Developmental Psychology, Forensic Psychology, Neuropsychology, Psychometrics, Exploratory Factor Analysis, Occupational Interests, Higher Education Assessment<\/p>\n The CPsy was conceived, constructed, and psychometrically validated by a specialized research team in vocational psychology, psychological measurement, and higher education pedagogy affiliated with the Faculty of Psychology at Universidad de La Sabana<\/a> in Ch\u00eda, Colombia:<\/p>\n The primary purpose of the Career Field Preference Questionnaire for Psychology Students is to deliver a scientifically grounded, multi-dimensional assessment of career trajectories and professional specializations specifically customized for the discipline of psychology. Modern undergraduate psychology curricula face an epistemological and pedagogical paradox: while psychology degree programs provide broad generalist training covering biological, cognitive, social, and developmental foundations, the contemporary labor market demands accelerated specialization and differentiated applied competencies. Psychology undergraduates frequently matriculate with generalized or romanticized notions of the profession—predominantly identifying psychology exclusively with individual outpatient psychotherapy—while remaining largely unaware of the demands, daily operational duties, and specific competency profiles associated with domains such as consumer behavior analysis, legal expert testimony, workplace ergonomics, or neuropsychological rehabilitation.<\/p>\n This lack of differentiated vocational clarity frequently precipitates professional identity crises during mid-to-late academic transitions, such as practicum placements, clinical internships, and post-graduate program selections. When students select specialized practicum tracks that clash with their underlying dispositional competencies and genuine occupational interests, universities observe elevated rates of academic dissatisfaction, internship attrition, vocational burnout, and post-graduation underemployment. The CPsy was engineered to mitigate these dilemmas by serving as a targeted diagnostic and exploratory tool that maps an individual’s personal attributes onto the specific operational realities of nine established fields of psychological practice.<\/p>\n In applied academic settings, the CPsy serves multiple structural and individual functions:<\/p>\n The psychological construct measured by the CPsy is Professional Field Preference<\/em> within psychological science, conceptualized as an integrated latent propensity that directs an individual’s vocational decision-making toward specific applied and academic domains. Rather than viewing career preference merely as superficial curiosity or recreational interest, the CPsy adopts a tripartite structural perspective wherein preference emerges from the continuous interaction among three interrelated psychological dimensions: (a) Domain-Specific Interests<\/strong> (activities and topics that intrinsically motivate the individual), (b) Perceived Professional Abilities<\/strong> (self-efficacy beliefs and demonstrable aptitude regarding specialized tasks), and (c) Congruent Personality Traits<\/strong> (dispositional behavioral patterns that facilitate sustained functioning in specific occupational environments).<\/p>\n The CPsy operationalizes this tripartite framework across nine distinct subscales, each representing a consolidated pillar of modern applied and academic psychology:<\/p>\n The theoretical architecture of the CPsy is firmly anchored in established vocational psychology paradigms, synthesizing John L. Holland\u2019s<\/a> Theory of Vocational Personalities and Work Environments (RIASEC model), Albert Bandura\u2019s<\/a> Social Cognitive Theory, and Lent, Brown, and Hackett\u2019s Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT).<\/p>\n Holland\u2019s classic typology posited that vocational choice represents an expression of personality, and that occupational satisfaction, stability, and achievement depend directly on the degree of congruence between an individual’s personality profile and the structural demands of the work environment. In generic vocational measures, individuals are classified across broad archetypes: Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, and Conventional. However, within a single academic major such as psychology, almost all sub-disciplines heavily draw upon the Social<\/em> and Investigative<\/em> categories, rendering general RIASEC inventories insufficiently sensitive to capture intra-disciplinary distinctions. The authors of the CPsy addressed this limitation by contextualizing Holland\u2019s foundational concept of person-environment fit into micro-environments unique to psychology. For example, an Investigative-leaning psychology student naturally gravitates toward Neuropsychology or Basic\/Experimental research, whereas an Enterprising-leaning student aligns with Organizational and Consumer Psychology, and a Social-leaning student aligns with Clinical, Educational, or Community practice.<\/p>\n While Holland provides the typology of environments, Social Cognitive Career Theory (Lent, Brown, & Hackett, 1994, 2002) provides the dynamic process model explaining how vocational preferences develop and crystallize. SCCT emphasizes three central cognitive mechanisms: self-efficacy beliefs (judgments of one’s capability to execute required actions), outcome expectations (beliefs regarding the consequences of performing those actions), and personal goals. The CPsy incorporates these social cognitive dimensions by requiring respondents to evaluate not merely whether a field sounds theoretically attractive (passive interest), but whether they perceive themselves as possessing the requisite abilities, cognitive competencies, and temperamental stamina to execute the field\u2019s signature tasks (perceived self-efficacy and ability fit).<\/p>\n By explicitly integrating interests<\/em>, abilities<\/em>, and personality traits<\/em> within each subscale, the CPsy overcomes the limitations of single-variable vocational inventories. Modern competence-based education models emphasize that effective professional practice requires knowledge (interests and academic understanding), procedural skills (abilities and self-efficacy), and behavioral dispositions (personality attributes like emotional stability, assertiveness, or social sensitivity). The CPsy operates under the theoretical premise that a sustained professional preference is only psychologically viable and predictive of long-term career success when an individual displays high levels across all three facets of the triad for a given specialization.<\/p>\n The validation protocol of the CPsy followed standard international recommendations established by the American Educational Research Association (AERA), American Psychological Association (APA), and National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME). Multiple lines of psychometric evidence were systematically gathered to substantiate the internal structure, content relevance, and domain representation of the scale.<\/p>\n The scale development began with an extensive conceptual review of national and international professional profiles across university curricula and professional bodies (such as the Colegio Colombiano de Psic\u00f3logos and the APA). This yielded an initial pool of 134 items designed to capture the tripartite dimensions across the nine fields. To ensure rigorous content validity, an expert judgment evaluation was conducted involving a panel of domain specialists:<\/p>\n This rigorous quantitative screening resulted in the elimination of 17 deficient, ambiguous, or conceptually redundant items, leaving a 117-item version that demonstrated high content validity for subsequent empirical administration.<\/p>\n The 117-item questionnaire was administered to an empirical validation sample of psychology students matriculated in Colombian universities. Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) was deployed to test the internal structure of the instrument. The mathematical extraction revealed a clean, highly interpretable nine-factor latent structure. During the structural refinement process, items failing to demonstrate primary factor loadings ≥ 0.40 or displaying cross-loadings onto secondary factors were iteratively eliminated<\/span>.<\/p>\n The finalized model retained 94 items, which explained 58.8% of the total cumulative variance<\/strong>. In psychometric scale development involving high-dimensional vocational inventories, accounting for nearly 60% of the variance with clean factor separation represents robust explanatory capability. Goodness-of-fit indices confirmed the empirical adequacy of the nine-factor solution:<\/p>\n Additionally, item-total correlations within each factor consistently exceeded r<\/em> = 0.50, and inter-item correlations within each respective factor were greater than r<\/em> = 0.40, providing robust evidence of convergent internal validity across the designated subscales<\/span>.<\/p>\n The reliability of the CPsy was evaluated by examining internal consistency coefficients across the full scale and within each of its nine constitutive factors. Because vocational inventories must maintain high measurement precision across differentiated subscales to prevent erroneous career advice, rigorous reliability standards were applied.<\/p>\n Internal consistency metrics for the overall instrument demonstrated exceptional reliability, with general scale coefficients ranging between α = 0.913 and α = 0.993<\/strong> across calculated split-half, composite, and Cronbach’s alpha estimations. These figures indicate that the measurement tool maintains high stability and minimal error variance across its global measurement architecture<\/span>.<\/p>\n When examined at the multidimensional subscale level, each of the nine factors demonstrated high internal consistency:<\/p>\n The empirical determination of the dimensional structure of the CPsy was conducted through rigorous Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA). The initial sample comprised university psychology students spanning emerging to established adulthood (ages 18 to 39 years), reflecting the demographic reality of undergraduate psychology programs in Latin America.<\/p>\n Prior to factor extraction, sample adequacy and matrix factorability were verified. The correlation matrix exhibited robust inter-item correlations, supporting the appropriateness of factor modeling. The EFA was executed utilizing an oblique rotation method, based on the theoretical recognition that preferences for specialized psychological fields are not entirely orthogonal (for instance, interest in Neuropsychology frequently correlates with Clinical and Health Psychology, while interest in Marketing Psychology frequently correlates with Organizational Psychology).<\/p>\n The exploratory analysis yielded a definitive nine-factor structure corresponding exactly to the nine theoretical fields conceptualized by Varela-Jaramillo and colleagues:<\/p>\n The 94 retained items exhibited distinct, clean factor loadings onto their respective latent constructs without problematic shared loads or significant secondary cross-loadings. The cumulative variance explained by the nine factors reached 58.8%<\/strong>, demonstrating solid empirical coverage of the multi-faceted vocational domain.<\/p>\n The Career Field Preference Questionnaire for Psychology Students (CPsy) was published in 2023<\/strong> in the Revista Brasileira de Orienta\u00e7\u00e3o Profissional<\/em>. The instrument is intended primarily for academic, non-commercial institutional, and scientific research purposes.<\/p>\n Fernando Riveros Munevar<\/strong> An in-depth academic review of the Career Field Preference Questionnaire for Psychology Students (CPsy), a 94-item psychometric instrument evaluating vocational preferences across nine professional fields of psychology.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","categories":[752,30,9073],"tags":[24017,24016,88,24019,24018,6,22086],"class_list":["post-8038","psych_scale","type-psych_scale","status-publish","hentry","category-educational-measurement","category-psychological-scales","category-vocational-psychology","tag-career-preferences","tag-cpsy","tag-factor-analysis","tag-occupational-interests","tag-psychology-students","tag-psychometrics","tag-vocational-guidance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/psych_scale\/8038","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/psych_scale"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/psych_scale"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8038"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/psych_scale\/8038\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Keywords<\/h2>\n
Authors<\/h2>\n
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Purpose<\/h2>\n
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Psychological Construct<\/h2>\n
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Theoretical Framework<\/h2>\n
Holland\u2019s Person-Environment Congruence Paradigm<\/h3>\n
Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT)<\/h3>\n
The Tripartite Integrated Competency Perspective<\/h3>\n
Validity<\/h2>\n
Content Validity<\/h3>\n
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Construct and Internal Structural Validity<\/h3>\n
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Reliability<\/h2>\n
Internal Consistency of the Total Scale and Subscales<\/h3>\n
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Factor Analysis<\/h2>\n
Factor Extraction and Structural Matrix<\/h3>\n
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Instrument \/ Measurement Tool<\/h2>\n
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Permissions & Fee and Test Year<\/h2>\n
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\nFaculty of Psychology, Universidad de La Sabana
\nCampus del Puente del Com\u00fan, Km. 7, Autopista Norte de Bogot\u00e1, Ch\u00eda, Cundinamarca, Colombia
\nEmail: edgar.riveros@unisabana.edu.co<\/a><\/p>\nReferences<\/h2>\n
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Items of the Scale<\/h2>\n