Career Field Preference Questionnaire for Psychology Students

Abstract

The Career Field Preference Questionnaire for Psychology Students (known in its original Spanish designation as the Cuestionario de Preferencias de Campos Profesionales Para Estudiantes de Psicología, or CPsy) 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 Ramírez Casteñeda, Andrea Santacruz, and Fernando Riveros Munevar at the Universidad de La Sabana 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, perceived abilities, and congruent personality traits 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.

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’s Content Validity Index (modified by Tristán-López, 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.

Keywords

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

Authors

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 in Chía, Colombia:

• Mariana Varela-Jaramillo — Faculty of Psychology, Universidad de La Sabana, Chía, Cundinamarca, Colombia. Email: [email protected]
• Santiago Ramírez Casteñeda — Faculty of Psychology, Universidad de La Sabana, Chía, Cundinamarca, Colombia. Email: [email protected]
• Andrea Santacruz — Faculty of Psychology, Universidad de La Sabana, Chía, Cundinamarca, Colombia. Email: [email protected]
• Fernando Riveros Munevar (Corresponding Author) — Faculty of Psychology, Universidad de La Sabana, Campus del Puente del Común, Km. 7, Autopista Norte de Bogotá, Chía, Cundinamarca, Colombia. Email: [email protected]

Purpose

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.

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.

In applied academic settings, the CPsy serves multiple structural and individual functions:

• Individual Vocational and Academic Advising: Academic mentors, faculty advisors, and university career counselors utilize the profile generated by the 94 items to guide students through elective coursework selection, faculty-mentored research lab matching, and professional internship choices.
• Curricular Evaluation and Program Development: Psychology departments and academic deans can administer the CPsy cross-sectionally or longitudinally to cohort groups to identify prevailing vocational trends, evaluate whether institutional resources match student specialization demands, and design targeted workshops for underrepresented sub-disciplines (e.g., psychometrics, research methodology, or consumer psychology).
• Institutional Retention and Well-Being Initiatives: Identifying misalignment between early student expectations and specialized field competencies allows educational psychology teams to implement timely vocational coaching interventions, preventing academic fatigue and course abandonment.
• Empirical Research Applications: The instrument provides a standardized psychometric metric for researchers exploring the sociodemographic, cognitive, and personality determinants of career trajectories within the behavioral sciences.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct measured by the CPsy is Professional Field Preference 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 (activities and topics that intrinsically motivate the individual), (b) Perceived Professional Abilities (self-efficacy beliefs and demonstrable aptitude regarding specialized tasks), and (c) Congruent Personality Traits (dispositional behavioral patterns that facilitate sustained functioning in specific occupational environments).

The CPsy operationalizes this tripartite framework across nine distinct subscales, each representing a consolidated pillar of modern applied and academic psychology:

• 1. Clinical and Health Psychology: Assesses preferences for psychopathological evaluation, psychotherapeutic intervention, health promotion, stress management, illness prevention, and crisis intervention in hospitals, mental health centers, and private clinical practice. Items capture an affinity for empathetic listening, psychodiagnosis, individualized case conceptualization, emotional tolerance, and working with individuals undergoing clinical distress.
• 2. Organizational and Work Psychology: Measures interest and perceived capability in industrial-organizational dynamics, human capital recruitment, talent selection, competency-based job profiling, organizational climate assessment, occupational health and safety, change management, and leadership development within corporate, industrial, and public institutions.
• 3. Marketing and Consumer Psychology: Measures inclination toward consumer decision-making research, neuromarketing, advertising strategy evaluation, brand perception modeling, behavioral economics, shopper experience design, and data-driven market segmentation. It incorporates capabilities in interpreting market trends, consumer motivations, and persuasive communication.
• 4. Neuropsychology: Evaluates interest in the relationships between brain architecture, neuropathology, and cognitive-behavioral functioning. It includes preferences for administering standardized neuropsychological batteries, identifying neurodevelopmental or acquired neurocognitive impairments (e.g., traumatic brain injury, stroke, dementia), and implementing cognitive neuro-rehabilitation protocols.
• 5. Sports Psychology: Encompasses vocational preferences centered on athletic performance optimization, mental training, psychological preparation of competitive athletes, coaching consultation, team cohesion dynamics, anxiety regulation under high-pressure competitive environments, and the promotion of psychological well-being across physical activity programs.
• 6. Forensic and Legal Psychology: Measures interest in the intersection of psychology and the judicial system. This includes forensic psychodiagnostic evaluation, criminal profiling, judicial assessment of imputability and criminal responsibility, custody evaluations, victimological assessment, expert witness testimony in court, and psychological rehabilitation within penitentiary facilities.
• 7. Educational and Developmental Psychology: Targets inclinations toward learning processes, psychoeducational intervention, school psychology, developmental transitions across the lifespan, curriculum adaptation for neurodiverse learners, academic counseling, teacher training, and institutional school climate optimization.
• 8. Basic and Experimental Psychology (Research Methodology): Evaluates orientation toward scientific epistemology, experimental design, laboratory instrumentation, statistical modeling, psychometric measurement construction, hypothesis testing, quantitative and qualitative data analytics, and the generation of fundamental psychological theory independent of immediate clinical applications.
• 9. Social and Community Psychology: Assesses orientation toward collective psychosocial intervention, participatory action research, community empowerment, human rights defense, social vulnerability mitigation, public policy design, and systemic interventions within marginalized, displaced, or culturally diverse populations.

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical architecture of the CPsy is firmly anchored in established vocational psychology paradigms, synthesizing John L. Holland’s Theory of Vocational Personalities and Work Environments (RIASEC model), Albert Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory, and Lent, Brown, and Hackett’s Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT).

Holland’s Person-Environment Congruence Paradigm

Holland’s 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 and Investigative categories, rendering general RIASEC inventories insufficiently sensitive to capture intra-disciplinary distinctions. The authors of the CPsy addressed this limitation by contextualizing Holland’s 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.

Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT)

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’s signature tasks (perceived self-efficacy and ability fit).

The Tripartite Integrated Competency Perspective

By explicitly integrating interests, abilities, and personality traits 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.

Validity

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.

Content Validity

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 Psicólogos 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:

• Two specialized expert psychologists were recruited to evaluate each specific professional field (18 field-specific judges).
• An additional panel of four senior psychometric and vocational experts reviewed the entire questionnaire for overarching structural clarity, syntax, semantic equivalence, and construct representation.
• Content validity was quantitatively analyzed using Lawshe’s Content Validity Index (CVI), applying the modified critical threshold criteria proposed by Tristán-López (2008). Items were retained only if they met or exceeded a Lawshe coefficient of 0.60.

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.

Construct and Internal Structural Validity

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.

The finalized model retained 94 items, which explained 58.8% of the total cumulative variance. 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:

• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): 0.870 (demonstrating acceptable structural fit within exploratory psychometric benchmarks).
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): 0.899 (approaching the standard 0.90 benchmark for complex multifactorial inventories).
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): 0.049 (indicating an excellent, close approximation of the model to the population covariance matrix, falling well below the 0.06 threshold recommended by Hu & Bentler).

Additionally, item-total correlations within each factor consistently exceeded r = 0.50, and inter-item correlations within each respective factor were greater than r = 0.40, providing robust evidence of convergent internal validity across the designated subscales.

Reliability

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.

Internal Consistency of the Total Scale and Subscales

Internal consistency metrics for the overall instrument demonstrated exceptional reliability, with general scale coefficients ranging between α = 0.913 and α = 0.993 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.

When examined at the multidimensional subscale level, each of the nine factors demonstrated high internal consistency:

• Subscale reliability coefficients ranged from α = 0.846 to α = 0.973.
• All nine factors substantially exceeded the conventional threshold of α = 0.70 required for group-level research, and met or exceeded the stringent α = 0.85 criterion established for high-stakes individual assessment and diagnostic decision-making.
• Item-rest correlations were consistently high, with no individual item deletion resulting in an increase in its corresponding factor alpha coefficient, verifying that all retained 94 items contribute meaningfully to the internal cohesion of their respective subscales.

Factor Analysis

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.

Factor Extraction and Structural Matrix

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).

The exploratory analysis yielded a definitive nine-factor structure corresponding exactly to the nine theoretical fields conceptualized by Varela-Jaramillo and colleagues:

• Factor 1: Social and Community Psychology — Captured items reflecting public health, vulnerable populations, social justice, and collective community interventions.
• Factor 2: Marketing and Consumer Psychology — Loaded items relating to consumer behavior, market research, advertising, and neuromarketing.
• Factor 3: Sports Psychology — Encompassed items measuring athletic mental preparation, performance under pressure, and team dynamics.
• Factor 4: Neuropsychology — Loaded items dealing with brain-behavior relationships, cognitive testing, and neuro-rehabilitation.
• Factor 5: Organizational and Work Psychology — Clustered items targeting human resource management, job profiling, occupational safety, and workplace organizational behavior.
• Factor 6: Forensic and Legal Psychology — Grouped items assessing judicial testimony, penitentiary intervention, victimology, and forensic psychodiagnostics.
• Factor 7: Research Methodology / Basic and Experimental Psychology — Clustered items involving quantitative analysis, psychometrics, experimental manipulation, and scientific theory generation.
• Factor 8: Educational and Developmental Psychology — Loaded items concerning school learning, psychoeducational support, child development, and pedagogical interventions.
• Factor 9: Clinical and Health Psychology — Grouped items reflecting individual psychotherapy, mental disorders, psychodiagnosis, and health promotion.

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%, demonstrating solid empirical coverage of the multi-faceted vocational domain.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Career Field Preference Questionnaire for Psychology Students (Cuestionario de Preferencias de Campos Profesionales Para Estudiantes de Psicología – CPsy)
• Authors: Mariana Varela-Jaramillo, Santiago Ramírez Casteñeda, Andrea Santacruz, and Fernando Riveros Munevar
• Year of Publication: 2023
• Instrument Type: Self-report vocational inventory / psychometric questionnaire
• Target Population: Undergraduate and graduate psychology students (Adults aged 18 to 39 years)
• Original Language: Spanish
• Total Number of Items: 94 items (refined from an initial pool of 134 items through content analysis and exploratory factor modeling)
• Dimensional Structure: Nine distinct subscales: (1) Social and Community Psychology, (2) Marketing and Consumer Psychology, (3) Sports Psychology, (4) Neuropsychology, (5) Organizational and Work Psychology, (6) Forensic and Legal Psychology, (7) Research Methodology / Basic and Experimental, (8) Educational and Developmental Psychology, and (9) Clinical and Health Psychology
• Response Format: 4-point Likert-type scale: 1 = “Totally in disagreement”, 2 = “In disagreement”, 3 = “In agreement”, 4 = “Totally in agreement”
• Administration Time: Approximately 20 to 30 minutes
• Administration Modality: Individual or group administration; paper-and-pencil or computerized/online survey systems
• Scoring and Interpretation: Subscale scores are obtained by calculating the sum or mean of the item responses corresponding to each of the nine dimensions. Higher scores within a specific subscale indicate stronger vocational preference, heightened perceived ability, and greater perceived personality congruence for that psychological field. Profiling can be represented visually via a standardized radar/polar chart to display relative vocational strengths and identify primary versus secondary career affinities.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Career Field Preference Questionnaire for Psychology Students (CPsy) was published in 2023 in the Revista Brasileira de Orientação Profissional. The instrument is intended primarily for academic, non-commercial institutional, and scientific research purposes.

• Commercial Status: Non-commercial
• Fee: Free of charge for academic, research, and non-profit educational counseling applications
• Permissions and Access: While the scientific study describing the instrument’s development, psychometrics, and subscale definitions is published under academic open-access principles, formal authorization to reproduce, adapt, or administer the complete 94-item questionnaire must be obtained from the corresponding author. Researchers and institutional counselors should submit formal written requests outlining their study protocol or clinical advising framework to:

Fernando Riveros Munevar
Faculty of Psychology, Universidad de La Sabana
Campus del Puente del Común, Km. 7, Autopista Norte de Bogotá, Chía, Cundinamarca, Colombia
Email: [email protected]

References

• Holland, J. L. (1997). Making vocational choices: A theory of vocational personalities and work environments (3rd ed.). Psychological Assessment Resources.
• Lent, R. W., Brown, S. D., & Hackett, G. (1994). Toward a unifying social cognitive theory of career and academic interest, choice, and performance. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 45(1), 79–122. https://doi.org/10.1006/jvbe.1994.1027
• Lent, R. W., Brown, S. D., & Hackett, G. (2002). Social cognitive career theory. In D. Brown & Associates (Eds.), Career choice and development (4th ed., pp. 255–311). Jossey-Bass.
• Tristán-López, A. (2008). Modificación al modelo de Lawshe para la cuantificación de la validez de contenido [Modification of Lawshe’s model for the quantification of content validity]. Avances en Medición, 6(1), 37–48.
• Varela-Jaramillo, M., Casteñeda, S. R., Santacruz, A., & Munevar, F. R. (2023). Desarrollo de un cuestionario de preferencias de campos profesionales para estudiantes de psicología [Development of a career field preference scale for psychology students]. Revista Brasileira de Orientação Profissional, 24(1), 71–86. https://doi.org/10.1037/e505292025-006

Items of the Scale