National Standardization of the Occupational Field Interest Inventory (OFII) for Turkish Culture According to Age and Gender

Problem statement: Interest can be defined as "when an individual pays attention to an object without special effort, maintains her/his attention for a long time, and is aware of and transforms this attentiveness into a response and an attitude." Vocational interests indicate an individual's feelings about employment, courses of study, hobbies, free time activities and life choices. A multitude of interest inventories are used for measuring vocational interest throughout the world. Currently in the Republic of Turkey, however, there are very few available interest inventories being utilized for educational and/or research purposes. Most of them are only used to established norms. Purpose of the Study: The aim of this study is to create a standardization process which incorporates the values to be used as norms in Occupational Field Interest Inventories (Mesleki Alan Ilgi Envanteri-OFII)'s for sub-dimensions according to age (13-19+ years old) and gender in Turkey. Method: The application has been performed in Level 1 of Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS). Twelve provinces, one from each region, were used in this application. Within the research group, a sampling method based on probability was used. Participants ranged in age from 11 to 26, but most (98.8%) were between 13 and 20. The participants consisted of 3799 students, 51% men (n = 1936) and 49% women (n = 1863). The data for the study was collected online using the OFII during a period of approximately one month. In this study, independent samples t test and two-way ANOVA were used for the significance of mean difference. Findings and Results: There were significant differences favoring men in six sub-dimensions: mathematics, computer, agriculture-outdoor, engineering, political-financial sciences and sciences (p