Author(s): Vautero, Jaisso ; Silva, Ana Daniela Santos Cruzinha Soares ; Taveira, Maria do Céu
Date: 2018
Persistent ID: https://hdl.handle.net/1822/55297
Origin: RepositóriUM - Universidade do Minho
Subject(s): Occupational Identity; Identity Status,; Validation; College Students
Occupational identity provides a sense of direction and meaning and helps to establish a framework to define occupational goals. One of most prominent frameworks for the study of occupational identity is Marcia’s identity status paradigm. The Dellas Identity Status Inventory was developed to assess occupational identity statuses according to Marcia’s framework. The aim of this study was to adapt and validate the Portuguese version of this inventory to the Brazilian population, using a sample of 358 college students of both sexes (72.9% woman), aged 18 to 41 years old (M=23.86, SD=4.57), attending a public university in the southern part of the country. The intercorrelations among the inventory subscales and its reliability (Cronbach alpha) and construct validity (principal factor analysis) were analyzed. Additionally, the inventory’s external validity was analyzed, taking into consideration the gender and age of the participants. We used the Kruskal-Wallis Test, Chi-Squares, and T-Tests in the external validity analysis. Results supported a clear interpretable four-factor solution (diffusion, achievement, foreclosure, and moratorium) and satisfactory reliability coefficients of the inventory subscales, from .79 to .89. Results for external validity indicate gender statically significant differences for Moratorium identity status, favoring male. Overall, the results of this study suggest that the Brazilian Portuguese Version of the Dellas Identity Status Inventory can constitute a useful measure to the study of vocational identity in the Brazilian population. Limitations and suggestion for further research are discussed.
