Career adapt-abilities scale — Netherlands form: Psychometric properties and relationships to ability, personality, and regulatory focus

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Abstract

The Career Adapt-Abilities Scale (CAAS) — Netherlands Form consists of four scales, each with six 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 satisfactory to excellent. The factor structure was quite similar to the one computed for the combined data from 13 countries. The Dutch version of the CAAS-Netherlands Form is identical to the International Form 2.0. The convergent validity of the CAAS-Netherlands was established with relating the CAAS subscales to self-esteem, Big Five personality measures, and regulatory focus. Relations between the subscales and these stable personality factors were largely as predicted. The discriminant validity of the CAAS-Netherlands was established by relating the CAAS scores to general mental ability; no significant relationship between career adaptability and general mental ability was found.

Highlights

► Describes construction of Career Adaptability Scale for the Netherlands. ► Reports psychometric characteristics of CAAS-Netherlands Form. ► Examines relations to general mental ability, personality, and regulatory focus.

Section snippets

Convergent validity

The convergent validity of a measure is established when it correlates with other validated measures that should be conceptually and theoretically linked to the measure of interest. We, specifically, expected that career adaptability would relate to relatively stable personality traits that direct people's cognitions, affective states, and behaviors, and that are important for their work and career outcomes.

Discriminant validity

For establishing discriminant validity (Campbell, 1960), we investigated the relationship between the CAAS subscales and a measure that we expected not to relate to the CAAS construct, namely general mental ability.

Participants

Participants were university students in the Netherlands (N = 465, 74% females). Mean age was 20.77 years (SD = 5.12) and approximately 95% was Caucasian. As part of a course requirement, they participated in several computer test sessions during a period of three weeks. The data of this study was collected at different points in time with several days between the CAAS measure, personality measures, and mental ability test. All participants gave their permission to use their data for research and

Measures

We measured the CAAS-Netherlands, self-esteem, the Big Five personality traits, promotion and prevention focus, and general mental ability.

Results

The CAAS-Netherlands 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 24 CAAS-Netherlands items ranged from (−.74 to −.25) and (−.57 to 1.14) respectively, suggesting that the items conform to the assumptions of confirmatory factor analysis for this sample. Scale means and standard deviations for all study measures, and correlations among these measures appear in Table 2. Skewness and kurtosis

Confirmatory factor analysis

Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) showed that data for the CAAS-Netherlands fit the theoretical model very well. The fit indices were RMSEA = 0.068 and SRMR = 0.07, which conform satisfactory to established joint fit criteria (Hu & Bentler, 1999). They are slightly lower than the fit indices for the CAAS-International model which were RMSEA = 0.053 and SRMR = 0.039 (Savickas and Porfeli, 2012-this issue Table 2, row M1b). The standardized loadings (see Table 1) suggest that all items are strong

Comparison of the CAAS-Netherlands factor model to international factor model

Comparing the CAAS-Netherlands hierarchical factor model to the model for the CAAS-International indicated that the loadings of first-order items on the second-order factors of adaptability were very similar. The most notable differences were for curiosity #5 (Probing deeply into questions I have), confidence #1 (Performing tasks efficiently), confidence #5 (Overcoming obstacles), and confidence #6 (Solving problems), showing a weaker loading in the Netherlands data. Of the second-order

Convergent and discriminant validities

The convergent validity was examined by relating the adaptability measure to self-esteem, the Big Five personality traits and regulatory focus. As can be seen in Table 2, significant correlations were found between the four adaptability subscales and most of these personality measures. We proposed that self-esteem would be positively related to all adaptability subscales (Hypothesis 1). All correlations (p < .01) between self-esteem and the adaptability subscales were positive and significant,

Discussion

In this study, we examined the psychometric properties, and the convergent and discriminant validity of the CAAS-Netherlands. The results showed that the total scale and four subscales of the CAAS-Netherlands each demonstrate sufficient to good internal consistency estimates and a coherent multidimensional, hierarchical structure that fits the theoretical model and linguistic explication of career adaptability resources. Moreover, the CAAS-Netherlands performs quite similarly to the

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