Persistence of occupational choice and personality congruence

To examine the predictive value of the Holland Vocational Preference Inventory (VPI) in determining perseverance in engineering, the VPI was administered to 102 freshmen engineering students. Ss were later divided into 3 groups as determined by their status at the beginning of their junior yr.: (a) Ss who were still majoring in engineering (N = 43), (b) Ss who had left engineering but were still attending the university (N = 33), and (c) Ss who had left the university (N = 26). A multivariate analysis performed on the VPI scale scores for each S was significant (D2 = 28.26, p < .01) showing that the scales were sufficient to differentiate among the 3 groups. Maximum differentiation occurred on the Social and Artistic scales.