Chapter 2 Items

Items are the foundation of the inventory. In total, 233 of the 244 items on the Strong 244 assessment are holdover items, while 11 items are new to the inventory. The new items are used to build the two new Basic Interest Scales - Hospitality & Tourism and Conservation & Environmentalism.

Items were eliminated primarily because they were judged to be redundant with holdover items (e.g., Sales executive was eliminated, Sales manager was held over). Other items were eliminated because they were either dated (e.g., Word processing) or referred to jobs that are in decline (e.g., Cashier in a bank).

2.1 Revised items

Of the items held over from the previous version of the Strong assessment, 11 were slightly revised and modernized. These revised items are displayed in Table 2.1.

We are assuming that these revisions will have no impact on the psychometrics of the assessment (all analyses in this supplement are performed using data based on responses to the previous versions of the items), but we will reevaluate this when enough new data has been collected using the revised items.

Table 2.1: Revised holdover items
Strong 244 item text 2004 item text
Actor Actor actress
Author of technical documents Author of technical books
Broadcast journalist Television announcer
Browsing popular mechanics websites Popular mechanics magazines
Browsing sports websites Sports pages in the newspaper
Building a website Constructing an Internet/Web site
Corporate lawyer Corporation lawyer
Managing a database Managing a computer database
News reporter Newspaper reporter
Trying new recipes Trying new cooking recipes
Viewing lectures online Attending lectures

2.2 Other structural changes to item presentation

Some changes have been made to the organization of items and how they are presented to respondents. The 2004 Strong assessment had six sections of items:

  1. Occupations
  2. Subject Areas
  3. Activities
  4. Leisure Activities
  5. People
  6. Your Characteristics

The Strong 244 assessment collapses Leisure Activities into Activities, so there are now five sections of items:

  1. Occupations
  2. Subject Areas
  3. Activities
  4. People
  5. Your Characteristics

Items are now presented in a random order for each respondent within each section. The sections of items are always presented in a fixed order.