Career Attitudes and Strategies Inventory™ (CASI™)

John L. Holland, PhD and Gary D. Gottfredson, PhD

Counselors describe the CASI as a career checkup that surveys beliefs, events, and forces affecting an individual's career as well as a way to identify influences or problems requiring further discussion and exploration.

In individual or group settings, the instrument helps to identify and clarify career problems and stimulates constructive discussion of these areas. Potential uses include a general assessment of a company's work environment, sources of worker dissatisfaction, degree of interpersonal abuse, etc.

The CASI provides a comprehensive inventory of a person's current work situation that includes common attitudes and beliefs as well as strategies for coping with job, family, coworkers, and supervisors. This inventory assesses the likelihood of job stability and helps to clarify situations the individual may perceive as career obstacles.

The CASI is a time-saver for clinicians because it is self-administered, self-scored, profiled, and interpreted. It surveys nine aspects of career or work adaptation:

• Job Satisfaction
• Interpersonal Abuse
• Work Involvement
• Family Commitment
• Skill Development
• Risk-Taking Style
• Dominant Style
• Geographical Barriers
• Career Worries

These scales provide a brief survey of attitudes, barriers, experiences, or strategies that may merit further exploration. In addition to the nine CASI scales, a special section on the answer sheet allows clients to check specific areas of concern from a list of 21 potential career obstacles (e.g., health or emotional problems, financial worries, education).

Administration/Scoring

The CASI can be administered, scored, and profiled in about 35 minutes. The Inventory Booklet contains 130 items. Test-takers mark their answers on the top part of a carbonless answer sheet. The bottom part of the answer sheet contains directions for scoring. Raw scale scores are then transferred to the Interpretive Summary booklet, which provides three score ranges with easy-to-understand interpretation for each scale. For a graphic picture of results, test-takers can plot their raw scores on the profile sheet on the last page of this Summary booklet.

The CASI manual describes the development of the instrument and discusses the typical characteristics of high and low scorers on each of the nine scales. Sixteen individual cases are profiled to illustrate the use of this instrument. Normative data and correlations with other career instruments are also presented. A self-test for test administrators is provided in the Appendix.