Sex Differences in Interests with Dr. Terence Tracey

Dr. Terence Tracey returns for part 2.

Dan and Dr. Tracey continue the conversation as they explore the origins of interests, particularly in relation to gender differences and cultural influences. Dr. Tracey then delves into the nature vs. nurture debate, examining how interests may be hardwired or learned, and how they manifest differently across cultures. The impact of developmental changes during adolescence on interests is also highlighted, emphasizing the importance of early interventions in education. At the end, they address the role of interests in career counseling and the ethical considerations of navigating gender norms in career choices.

Special Guest: Dr. Terence Tracey

The Personal Growth Inventory

Gender Differences on Interests

🎞️ Video version of the show@PsychotherapyAppliedPsychology on YouTube
🛜 Check out the website: Listen to every episode on your podcast player of choice

Connect with Dan
☏ Leave a voice message on Speakpipe
🔗 LinkedIn
📬 TheAppliedPsychologyPodcast@gmail.com

🦋@danielwcox.bsky.social

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction and Overview
• 1:12 Are sex differences in interests hard wired or learned?
• 9:40 Cultural constraints on occupational decisions
• 15:08 Developmental Patterns of Interests in Children
• 23:00 Timing of STEM interventions
• 27:00 Cultural Structures and Interest Development
• 38:00 Interest Profiles and Workplace Behavior
• 45:00 Integrating Interests in Psychotherapy
• 55:00 Pushback on Interest and Gender Research

Transcript

0:00

[Music] Broadcasting from the most beautiful city in the world, I'm your host, Dr. Dan Cox, a professor of counseling psychology at the University of British Columbia. Welcome to episode number 50 of Psychotherapy and Applied Psychology, where we dive deep with the world's leading applied psychology researchers to uncover practical insights, pull back the curtain, and hopefully have some fun along the way. If you find the show useful, it'd be much appreciated if you shared it with someone else who might enjoy it too. Today, I couldn't be more excited to welcome back one of the world's authorities on interests. My guest is a professor emeritus of counseling psychology from Arizona State University, the former editor of the Journal of Counseling Psychology, a fellow in the American Psychological Association and the American Educational Research Association, and he's won Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Society of Vocational Psychology and the Society of Counseling Psychology. In this part of our conversation, we discuss several aspects of interest, including how interest develop, the impact of sex on career choices, applying interest in psychotherapy, balancing client needs and social expectations, and much more. This episode begins with my guest responding to my question, about if sex differences in interests are hard, wired, or learned. So without further ado, it is my pleasure to welcome back my very special guest, Dr. Terrence Tracey. No one's going to be able to enter that. I don't think in the next 50 years. Let me redefine that. Are they universal? Right. Are they consistent across cultures? Is that how we think about that? So I consistent across cultures. In terms of nature, nurture issue, come on, we've been debating that forever. I've gone, it's been a cornerstone for our field in all sorts of ways. Even with my kids, it's kind of like giving them, I've given the girls, like trucks and things. Things like that, much to my chagrin. My favorite, I had a student who talked about it. She was going to make her girl an engineer. So she brought her trucks and things and everything, and one day she came and she didn't buy her any dolls. She came out and she saw her daughter playing with the trucks and the trucks were talking to each other and having tea and she said, I give up. So yeah, I don't know. So we do know from the heritability studies that, you know, about 40% of interest are heritable. Again, you know, given the caveats about heritability research. You know, so I don't see us as doing this, but looking at these things across cultures is can kind of provide an idea of some of that. The problem with doing any cross-cultural research using any assessments are, many times we just can't translate scales in the different languages. We have to do a whole lot of work in terms of validating them in those contexts. And, you know, one of the things that I have done is doing a lot of work in international assessment. And many times, many of the scales just do not work when we translate them and take them out. It's extremely expensive to develop scales, so it's easy to understand why people just translate it and give it, but they don't work often. But, so some of the research I did, and these have problems too. So some recent ones, we had a chance where Time Magazine had a website and they do things to kind of ask, they give that little questionnaires to their readers. And so they offered, we put out a short version of the PGI on this for about a week. And we had through 200,000 responses from 79 countries, with at least 30 people of those. We had a bunch of others. So again, one caveat of this is, it's all in English. So we know it works in English, but we don't know that it works in other things. It would be very cumbersome to try and get 79 locally validated scales. So that's a caveat. But what we found was that, yeah, across all of these countries, people things, really the gender difference was 1.04. So it was very similar to how it is in the US. So it exists all across the world. What we did find though, that this was kind of moderated. And by that, I mean, some countries are higher, some countries are lower, and by what? And we found that, I got my little notes here, because I can't remember these things off the top of my head. Countries that are wealthier, the difference was less. Countries that were more supportive of women, the UN has a measure for all the countries about, you know, it goes from zero to one, it captures how the ratio of men to women working, the visibility of women in political positions, support for women's health, a variety of things. And so the countries that were higher on support for women, also, there were, these were less. So versus countries where these things, the poorer countries, and where the countries that were more say, traditionally male dominated, the more traumatic people things, differences. This one somewhat counter to a very, a good study done by Stoten Geary, maybe five, six years ago. They also did an international study, but they looked at aspirations. What do you want to be? What are you studying? Those kind of things. And they found that countries that were wealthier had the opposite effect, such that the wealthier countries, the people things differences were greater. So there are many more women in people's type of people, people aspirations in wealthy countries than they did in poorer countries. And I think this is somewhat a function of focus on aspirations versus interests. Asperations is kind of like taking a kind of person environment match. These are things that I want to be doing. And so these are things that I'm going to be choosing to do. And so that's not determined just by interest, but many other things. Can I get a job in this? Is this reasonable? Is this possible to be done? And I think that's kind of why these results are different. Because there are many more constraints in some of the poorer countries. One of the things I found, what starter means, whole thing was I'm overgiven some talks about interest in Taiwan and China. I'm talking about this gender effect. And I'm talking about why it's a big deal in the US because of STEM. And they just looked at me. And they said, what? And I go, yeah, women are underrepresented in STEM occupations. It said, what? It's not a real true there. They are as representative, not more represented. And so I'm going like, why? And so it's not an issue of the interest per se. It's an issue of the constraints. There from kind of talking to a lot of people, I really got they, in terms of making their choice, it had little to do with interest because they felt that they couldn't afford that. They had to choose occupations that paid well and that there was some opportunity to move ahead for them and their families. So in other words, they were driven by external constraints to choose things. And so I think what we get is interest are important to pay off, but they don't determine what you go into. There, that's where society's constraints can come in and play. And that's kind of what, because I remember I was talking to several people there. And like I've met a bunch of, you know, I give them to talk about interest. And I met a bunch of women who 35, 38, you know, and this is like seven people on it in this boat. Very successful engineers and scientists. They didn't like their jobs. And so they were, they were kind of going, oh, I can think about things differently because they wanted much more, they, this is where that people things came in, they wanted much more people to contact. And they felt very dissatisfied with their jobs. Even though they were remarkably successful. And so there would be a case of, yes, they were successful, but they were not satisfied and they weren't satisfied because the job didn't match their interests. But they went into it for constraints of that culture. And so cultures really do choose, constrain what we can choose. The interests are still there. But they can kind of do it. So that's why this finding was cultures that were richer had in the sense the jobs represented the interest differences. So there were many more women in S jobs in the societies that were wealthier. Which is, but in your large study where you were looking at interest, not in the jobs that they get, just the interests. That's the difference. So there still is this interest difference. But I think what happens is, society is kind of constrained how much we actually use those interests in terms of the job selection. So for your study where you found that in wealthier nations. And I would imagine that, and I forget the language that you use basically, I don't know, empowering women or something, something, something like that that I would imagine there's a correlation between the nations that are more likely to empower women and the nations that are wealthy. That those two things go together to some extent. They're correlated, but it's they're not interesting. I some more of it. Okay. So the women, so let's talk about then just the the nations that are more about empowering women. So in that case, you found that the ones that were more empowering with women that the gender difference was less in terms of interests. Still there. Right. Well, that's what I was going to ask like how much less. And I'm not asking for a specific effect size, but more like a ballpark. Like does it go down to point one standard deviation instead of one standard deviation? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, the scale is much smaller. Yeah, no, no, no, but I mean, you're still like, you're still like more like over half of a standard deviation. So again, so the the mean was a D of 1.04, which is you, and so you had some countries at a D of like 1.5, 1.6, right? And some other countries down to about a D of 0.6. That was about as low as we got. It's still big though. It's still big. Yes. So that's what I mean. This is a very resilient difference in interests. It is moderates somewhat by country. Yeah, I mean, that's still a quite a, I mean, we're speaking in generalities here, but that's still quite a large moderating effect. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And so the culture, so if you think about these culture can have clearly an impact in terms of our interests, I was, and I was arguing earlier, clearly has an impact in terms of job choice. And that's kind of makes obvious sense. But in terms of culture clearly has an index of how much these things exist. They're still there, but clearly it can kind of shrink them. And so and then in the case of sort of the anecdotal example that where you were talking about when you were giving these talks in China and Taiwan, what that was suggesting is that culture is influencing the career choices that women make, increasing the probability that they're going to be in some stem fields. But it and even though they were very successful on the outcome of satisfaction for some of them because they were sort of culturally rewarded for going into those disciplines that it resulted in a negative effect on their outcome of satisfaction. And certainly in terms of satisfaction, these individuals obviously were very select since they were so very successful, they could they had the luxury of kind of even thinking about another option. And that's not going to be true for most people. So when we think about this developmentally, when do sex differences like how can we think about that or understand it developmentally as people are developing as they're getting older when these sort of sex differences show themselves when they get strong all that stuff. I got a bunch of research there too. Part of this started with, yeah I kind of wanted to know about that. And so I kind of got into kind of a fascinating area assessing children and developing tests that you can use on children. And I started with kind of like most people and it's still very true. You kind of take an instrument that exists in to give it to kids. You get garbage. And so I kind of got I got way laid for several years kind of doing kind of studying the valid assessment of children using kind of paper and puzzle. And so you know because you know when you think about interests, these are pretty much things that exist inside us, inside our head. We could make and there have been some really studies looking at maybe kindergarten kids looking at what they choose to play with. You might make some inference about what the child's interested in. But those are some pretty big ifs and a lot of assumptions there. And you know a lot of also that depends upon what kind of options the kid has to play with. So you know I didn't want to kind of go that route because I had problems. So I really needed to kind of focus on getting kids to talk about what they like to do. And I found and then you know using I get talked to them but I also wanted to get a paper and pencil sort of thing. And so I found after doing a lot of talking and testing, you know I apologize to my daughters I use them and their friends a lot and kind of oh I got to try this out for you when I go on not again. Back when they were young about fourth grade you can start to have kids take some self-reading scales. They can use a pretty basic kind of liquor type scale if you give them real clear examples of how to do that. You just can't do it. You have to walk them through things with things that they're familiar with. And so I found using food examples, you know how much do you like ice cream, you know as you know kind of an extreme yes to how much do you like Brussels sprouts. And so there they could kind of get a grasp of it and then they could kind of go through and talk about things. Another thing I learned is and this is hindsight wonderful. You kind of have to give them items that they actually can read. So we had in early versions we gave out we kind of took a version and a measure that we give out to high school students we thought it'd be kind of simple and it had an item in there. How much do you like repairing cars and these kids would answer a whole lot. They don't know anything about repairing cars but it was kind of an aspirational thing. Oh I would love to try and repair a car. So we kind of realized now that we got to come down to things that they actually can do and have tried and they know they like. So it got pretty basic. How much do you like hammering nails? So it's a very basic kind of things. It items that they can identify as they have done so they can make some assessment of whether or not they like it or not. And so both of us together we developed inventory of children's activities and it's very nice and used in I think 32 countries now. But anyway so what we found we used this scale. Children's interests in kind of elementary school or grammar school were pretty high in general and fairly undifferentiated. So they didn't make a lot of differences between social type things and realistic type things they kind of like things. They hit that transition to middle school in everything dramatically dropped for everybody. And it was very surprising just one year later boom the bottom drops out and the bottom especially dropped out for girls in R type R and I type things. They were all pretty high in elementary school and then they just dropped. And then after that as they go through middle school and high school we found that pretty much all the interests kind of came back up again they became more differentiated. I start learning that I like investigative things more than enterprising things. And so I start differentiating more and the interests come back up. And that happened with everybody and everything except girls in investigative and realistic areas. They stayed low. And so that that key time from elementary school to middle school really kind of that was when all this stuff at the fan. And so you know I don't know you know my conjecture is there's this is a very flux time. You know you have puberty kicking in and that makes people crazy in general. You have the shift to middle school where all of a sudden there's many many you don't have the sheltered environment. You are in struck with all others. Competition takes on a whole new importance. Pure groups kind of take on a whole new importance than they did before that. And also just the cognitive changes at that time are key. Girls are actually a little bit faster in terms of being able to kind of think about these things more complexly than boys are. And you know again interest kind of take a dive. And so all these things are kind of going on which could account for it. But the implication this is if we want to have people think about STEM you can play around in high school all you want but you've missed the boat already. You want to capture them in middle school when it kind of tanks. And you know because that's the key time. And that's the time you want to capture and get them interventions. Also pragmatically it's a key not only for the interest but for just pragmatics of becoming moving into STEM areas. In middle school is when you take those math courses. There's a math track. If you do not take those sign up for those first math classes in middle school you're at least a year behind everything else and you cannot change gears in high school and go into this track. So the math track is really kind of nailed down and that's a key key time when these decisions get made. So if you want to keep options open that's when you make the interventions. You make them before these choices have been made because afterwards it doesn't matter. So that's where I see it kind of happening. There's a lot of research in terms of looking at changing interests. In most all of it in some it's very good but most all of it just looks at I go through these interventions and say girls become more interested in science. Fine. The drawback here is it ignores all the other interests. And so much of the research just goes look see this intervention work. No it didn't because and then some of the follow ups they don't find them kind of following through is because they ignored the fact that these other interests the profile is very different. So if you ignore the fact that social interests are high and I only focus on investigative and I got the investigative scores to come up. I don't know say it. The point three the girls still have very high social interests and that's going to drive things more than just that one score. So I'm struck by so how are you describing this? So kids up to 10 11-ish-ish they're pretty undifferentiated so it's a pretty the when you look at their interests they're on average all around-ish the same. There's not a huge dramatic and then they hit that 12 13 years old correct me if I'm wrong here on the NEVs and sort of their own. Whatever middle school is yeah. Yeah and they their overall interests just sort of drop and then once they sort of get past that then it starts to become more differentiated. So when it drops it's still relatively flat and then they start differentiating. And then it starts to look more like an EKG where it's some highs and some lows on different things. Yeah. Okay so one of the things as you're talking and you're explaining okay so what could be the explanation for this and one of the things that you said was the environmental one which is kids go into middle school right set. One of the things I was thinking about is I don't know if it's nationwide with at least in British Columbia. Well actually I don't even know if it's all the province but at least in Vancouver there is no middle school. So they stay in elementary school if you will until they go to high school. So I was thinking like that would be it you know they're sort of a there'd be like an opportunity there for that sort of like to remove that variable in British Columbia to see. And so you could kind of look at no that's why I would think it would be cool. Is it still like elementary school do you have kind of contained classes and that that warm you know the nice warm environment. Okay so I mean you know I mean that they are they're in the same school building with five year olds with kindergartners and now they often have like a separate playground so again I'm speaking very anecdotally based on my own kids you know because if you had 11 and 12 year olds with five year olds the five year olds would just get stomped on right that would that would be no good but there's you have to kind of do that but but they're still in the same space generally speaking and yes they're like they don't switch classes or whatever it's yeah that's just that's the larger thing they still have a contained class and so there's not going to be as much of the competition the comparison because my comparison pulls more and that's kind of one of the things about middle school is all sudden I go from a nice contained thing where I kind of know where I fit and how things work go to bad to a huge comparison pool. As we're having this conversation you know this this area is so interesting you as a person has sort of got into this field sort of thinking as a traditional psychologist or even psychotherapist which I tend to think people might some people would disagree with this but I think the majority would agree that as a psychotherapist your job is to best help your client the person you know which is typically the person who is sitting across from you you know my job is not to benefit the world my job is to benefit Steve or Joan or whomever is sitting across from me and that I'm noticing in this or I'm feeling in this work that tension because in a way even if it's even if it's you know if you were to say it's mostly which I'm not saying you're saying but even if we were to say it's it's you know 90% of this is culturally based that when I'm working with the 18-19 year old based on their interests regardless of how where they got to how they got here they're here and so my job is to help them get into the major the occupation that they're going to do well and and be happiest in and live their best life in jungle right which is in some ways different than the problem that we're talking about which is much more of a as a society you know that we're pushing back on some of these are concerned about some of these traditional gender roles which I think is a reason we'll think to be concerned about but like it's sort of like should we use the sex norm version or not the sex normed version it's like well what is our goal to most help our client or is our goal to most influence society well and I you know I think we can kind of certainly interests and careers are not the only realm for these kind of ethical quandaries in practice you know because oftentimes what the client might be advocating we might not think is the best avenue but we still have to kind of support them for many things that they want to do so this is you know certainly it is a difficult one we can so yeah where's our responsibility we want to make society better and clearly that's a lot of what the whole stem focus is on and so we can make interventions that help this I mean I like to think that we don't make say girls go through these stem interventions kicking and screaming maybe there are parents that do that in hopes that this will be good and yes I have dressed my girls in blues and blacks and my boys and I could never get pink on them so in in hopes of kind of doing things but I think that so I think there's always those tensions and we always and I would like to kind of at least talk about some of these with clients but ultimately yes what where is what is the goal and what is the goal right now is my goal with this person help them expand options and they're on board with that is my goal with this person to help them kind of make some selections that have the highest probability of making them happy and doing well and so those are two different goals and these would be things that I'd be talking with and that we would be kind of clear on it's not mine to decide it shouldn't be you know even if I strongly believe in it these are you know and this is so I don't view it as different from other decisions we make with our clients yes we can kind of talk about it and then once we agree to what we're going to do and we do it so one one more question I had about the sex difference stuff is so a while ago I had Najia Fouad on the podcast and so a big area of her work which is girls women in STEM and she was really one of the take homes that I had was that one of the and she's done a bunch of work on engineering specifically and so one of her take homes was one of the reason that girls and women aren't are under represented in engineering maybe the primary reason is because of what engineering culture because engineering culture basically pushes them out right and I guess I'll be curious what your thoughts were about that and how your work maybe speaks to that well again the environment matters a whole lot and so and that's kind of some of that's kind of getting at the justification for the validity of the not not sex norm because this way the girls are not going to score high in I and R and engineering is I and R it's got no S whatsoever that's guy I started out as an engineer and that's one of the reasons I left was because I really didn't like the engineer you know they're not it yeah they there's no social contact you didn't do that that just wasn't part of what they did and so yes it's a bad fit and so you know you can blame engineering environment but to some extent this is what the people in these areas do they're not social you can't make them social and and so yes it is difficult and so yeah maybe you can put in some some support some other ways around it but ultimately the job is kind of an IR kind of thing and so yes I that's a common finding with a lot of people is yes they're pushed out because they don't their interests don't match what they're doing and so they would like to get more it most of the stuff I've seen is more social contact I'd like to talk about these things and that just doesn't happen or you know just general things checking in with each other or when people are having a little difficulty just checking in with that my experience that's not what engineers do and they're fine with that so even the so for the women of course speaking generalities for some women who are who do have elevated I and R but also have relative to men the male many of the male engineers elevations on s that it becomes kind of an inhospitable environment because how one would do training how one would do problem solving how one would do feedback promotions dealing with problems challenges whatever that just for many of the folks there because they have practically zero s that a person who even has moderate levels of s is just going to feel you know like a fish on fish on land yeah interesting I mean you know just in terms of how things get started how things get talked about you have group projects and I'm sure you've seen some of these the group project comes down to okay you do that I'll do this and then we'll get back together and put them together versus well let's talk about this what are the different ways of doing this we could kind of do it together very different ways of approaching a task that's it you know is I this is something I've noticed even in in my work that I've made this and I hadn't linked it with interests but one of the things I've noticed is many of my colleagues or women that when they're working on a paper with their collaborators how they do it is so much different than how I or most men do it you know I have you know one of my colleagues what she does is particularly with her co-author who she does a lot of her work with is the both both of them will simultaneously be in a Google doc co-writing right to me I have never done anything like that to me what co-authorship looks like is one of us does the majority of the work and then sends it to the other person who's going to give feedback and track changes and sends it back or something like that or maybe you'll write a little bit of it but it's much more autonomous yeah you know just there's a couple of touch you know couple of touch points but and I just and I see that in my in the difference between the men and women in just in our world and I think in part of me I would say you know part of me is somewhat envious of how women typically do it because it's like oh that sounds nice like I really like my my colleagues and my collaborators like it would be kind of nice to spend more time with them and sort of be like co-working on these things more in more of those social contexts but it is not something I've ever done and it would make me absolutely crazy right in that interest statement yeah but I could yeah but I think part of that is yeah no I would have a hard time in that contact separating the work part well a few problems one is separating the work part from just the socializing part right and and it's kind of like we would I would get distracted if we go off on not damaging we go off on this tangent I can't see myself getting a whole lot ridden so you know that would that's one unless we were real clear about okay we got we got to stay on task and the other one is I get in a zone and I got a I got to be in my zone so when I'm rating right but it's just like it the idea of it is just like we're you know just pushes you get pushed away from the idea of it you know it's just oh yeah it's so interesting okay so I have a handful of sort of miscellaneous questions if you don't mind that I can jump to you from here for okay so one of them so the personal globe inventory so in preparation for this I took the measure and one of the interesting things about the PGI is you assess interest in the PGI so just to be clear what it what that looks like is a whole bunch of lists of occupations where people rate the occupations from one to seven on how much they like them so you know some examples of so you just say sculptor you just say banker you say social worker and people one one to seven right for hundred plus occupations and there's different versions of the measure so they're shorter versions longer versions then you also have two additional scales so you also have a liking scale and a competent scale so for the liking scale folks rate how much they from strongly dislike to strongly like and for the competence from unable to do to very competent and you have specific tasks so you have things like write poetry help others repair computers and for each one of those the person rates their assessment of how much they would like to do something like that and you explicitly say this is like don't think about how good you are at this just would you like to do it like when I took it I was like oh write poetry I'll put that as a three you know but my competence would be a one and then for and then you also have them right their competence for those exact same items so just sort of curious about your thinking about both interests as well as liking and competence and including all three of them simultaneously well really the the interest is the liking part so the first part is I had several scales when was rating occupations and then I also have the activities where you do liking or competence so okay when you can tell um but you know there is a lot of thinking about you know self-efficacy people choose things that they are feel efficacious in um and so I kind of wanted to capture both liking and self-efficacy are correlated but they're far from isomorphic and we say isomorphic you mean the same so if I like something I feel competent in it no but generally that's true so they are correlated but they're not the same um and so you know and then I did a bunch of research on on them and and you know the say social cognitive theory posits that interests lead to competence and so uh and some other people posit the opposite if I'm good at it I learned to like it um and so my research kind of looked at longitudinal stuff and over time yeah interest lead the competence and competency is the interest and they both kind of reciprocally related to each other but they're not the same so you know in your case say you were interested in poetry and you have absolutely no self confidence in your ability to do that fine this is kind of where you're at and that's fine um what you see when you put these together is sometimes people have some pretty interesting profiles most people they agree you know my profile agrees um but some people and you know they'll have a profile where um say um and this is actually a fairly common one I saw a lot with kind of engineers a lot of competence in terms of math and science feel good about their ability to do that and are engineering and not working um and um but not as much interest in it they're starting to find it boring but they have a high interest in kind of the social things kind of like those women I was talking about in Taiwan and China but no perceptions of competence in those areas and so this presents a real dilemma for these people because you know I'm going to feel good at it but I hate it um and you know one of the big things particularly for engineers is they can only go so far and then come to shift that they had if they want to go ahead they have to move into management um and many of them that no interest skill in doing that um and so it's a rare bird that has those skills and can move forward but here this one person's profile was he didn't feel good enough for his ability to do that so that became kind of the focus for this person is to kind of have to build some self-confidence because clearly he wanted to do this he wanted to highlight working with others but just felt bad about his ability to do that and so they they can disagree and it provides some real interesting data to kind of particularly if you know you're working with a client um but uh generally they agree got it okay so what's do you have a sense of what's more important in terms of and obviously there's different outcomes right but like in terms of their association with outcomes mean interest or or efficacy on content perceptions um again they're kind of be pretty highly correlated my guess is and this is strictly guess um is uh interest because if if I approach things I will spend time doing it I'm going to get better at it um if I'm competent yeah but I might not approach him interest are probably the driving mechanism for me to go near something and so if I kind of go in and if I'm interested I'll try it even if I stink for a while so one of the other things I wanted to talk about was the application of interest in working with clients and we've obviously it's come up a few times in our conversation I think that it's not unusual to hear someone say yeah my university career counselor said that I should be a flight attendant what do they know and they you know throughout the whole thing and we all have I what was mine I took the strong and high school and I was going to be a farest stranger um so yeah you get oh you know you can always get stranger results but I think that's the probability getting something like that is higher if you just give a test and let them go um but anybody who kind of sat down with these clients it clearly is you're giving them not just the supposed answer you're giving them a structure for how to think about this so if I just took Holland's model if I could get them to understand Holland's model I could get them to understand how these choices could be made and you know when I talked to that person about okay so you got a high score year and so what are the types of things you like doing um and the person will soon see that you know all the things that they're approaching all the things that they like are kind of fall right here and so while maybe this one occupation isn't the the one you thought that is a good fit but if you can get them to understand the structure of the scale they can kind of oh yeah okay I see that pretty much all the stuff I do is are um and so that helps me understand things I'm going to like that helps me understand things I could think about you know it also helps me eliminate a whole lot of other stuff that I'm not going to be interested in um it might also help and sometimes this is good particularly with younger clients a lot of them don't know some of the interest areas and so you might want to you say to them well have you ever done this oh no and you say you get them to try some of the other areas that they you know clearly they're saying that they don't know anything about again that's the exploration kind of thing um and so a test gives not just supposed answers but really a structure for how to think about it and so when I'm working with somebody I get them you know what kind of things do you like um what do you do we start there and then I talk a little bit about the model and go see this is kind of what you got here and these are realistic things and you've been doing all these different things are all real similar I guess I didn't realize that before and so you're giving them a very simple way to kind of explain it and that's really what the test is doing how can I make sense of the world um because I have to make some big decisions and here that can help me eliminate a lot of the things and it can help me even focus in more closely on things that are important it strikes me that interest inventories are something that it's an underutilized tool by psychotherapists that generally we think about this is something that's done by your you know at the career center or by career counselor or someone like that you go give the test and they give you the answers in your right and that unless I'm at you know unless I'm in high school in university maybe if I'm switching careers uh but unless I'm sort of at those couple of developmental points or transition points this is not a thing and it strikes me particularly with with your measure that where you have that um interest and competence sort of both of those scales that it gives you the ability you know when you have a client who's struggling at work let's say right which is pretty common or you know and that could mean lots of different things right the example of the women that you gave they were in terms of how their their boss is their managers now they're superstars right they're doing great so in that sense they're not struggling at work at all but they don't like it very much so in that sense they're really struggling at work that by giving a tool like this it allows you perhaps to see like okay where is this maybe there's just some mismatch is going on so you're spending 40, 50, 60 hours a week whatever it is not really aligned with what you're interested in how could we how is there a way that we could work or think about this in a way that could get you more aligned well I think it one of the possible benefits of it is it presents information about the lack of alignment uh uh you know because a lot of people I'm going to work I'm not happy I'm kind of struggling through but I'm doing okay but I just don't just give some nice clear concrete evidence of what exactly is going on and where the discrepancies are and where it needs to be attended to versus just kind of feeling like things suck. Yeah yeah I think yeah it is an interesting thing and something that I do think I don't know yeah it's not something and it is interesting too in our training that for those of us in programs that do train on sort of career vocational related stuff that we really do often separate these things you know and that we probably do a disservice by not integrating them more in the training right that when folks are in our in-house clinic that we that as client situations arise where maybe this would be valuable that we don't even think to sort of suggest it for the student to work with the client in this particular context. Oh I agree I recall you know in my internship I way back you know I had you know I like many people kind of kept career focused and real meat emotional social issues separate and I remember I had this client who was really kind of torn up about some career issues and I talked to my supervisor go what shall they do in here you know it's a he goes it's the same thing it's not any different you're making choices and we think we can minimize them by just kind of just a simple choice if you think about what we're asking people to do this is probably the biggest choice they'll make in their entire life. It determines who they are it I introduce myself of my as having a certain occupation people know me that way it's perhaps more than any other choice that we make and yet we minimize it. Okay random question and then we'll sort of close up one of the things that struck me as I was taking particularly the PGI words just the interest and so it lists the professions and then you rate the professions so I was taking it I was thinking okay so social worker but there's so many different facets of being a social worker you know so I'm sort of rating it based on this large conceptualization that I have but what gets lost in that right is like the there's a thousand different things the social worker does in their day to day and when you were talking about when you gave when you were talking about the the tool that you developed for kids how much do I like hammering a nail so like that's so much more specific and focused and so it's sort of intuitively and maybe I'm wrong about this it seems like that's almost a better way at getting at the areas of the domains of interest because it's so much more specific right that is clearly realistic where if I say construction form or something like that there's the realistic part of that but there's also the social part of that so I guess I'm just sort of curious about you know using the occupations as a way to as the the stimuli to have people respond to these interest inventories versus more of the specific tasks well if you if you notice they're both their activities and the occupations right I moved away from the occupations one so really you took a very old version of the test for several reasons one just that and the other one is you can't translate occupations across countries you know so it's just I had I started out early on and I'm kind of you go like I had like bartender and we were translating in into farce and in my people were saying there's no such thing as a bartender we don't serve alcohol you know that's just an example like dancing and we had several then some cultures just don't do that so yes we kind of pitched the occupations for just those those reasons and so we focus much more on the activities because they're much more straightforward activities occurring all cultures but the occupations don't no great okay I feel validated thanks okay so question I ask everybody is what kind of pushback if any have you had towards your work well you know obviously the big one is who cares about interests and you know more what we need another interest measure so those are probably the big ones I get so I've gotten a whole lot more attention internationally than I have in the US for the PGI and the children's measure and I think that the part of that is internationally the prestige I mean here in America a lot of people I don't like that I don't know anyone to think about that but internationally they seem to that's just part of the world so they seem much more amenable to it and also in many of these countries it's they're very interested so you know I look at some of the countries I've worked with they're they're becoming say more prosperous or things are changing so much that they need some help some guidance to help people make decisions because if they think about many of these countries you know what are you what are you going to do for an occupation you're going to you did what your parents did and that was just the way things were but as this starts deteriorating more and more across the world and things are opening up more we could say oh that's good because we're really allowing these things to happen but think about the cost to the people in those positions how do you then make decisions about where you're going to go so if we open opportunities that's great but it also presents a huge burden on the individuals for how to deal with that and so a lot of these countries have been looking for interest test to kind of help people do some of that because they didn't have there there are no structures in place to facilitate that and I think in the US we see much more the average person has much more occupational information about what kind of things go into different jobs and they you know they see their parents doing a whole bunch of different things a whole bunch of other people doing different things and so they start to get some ideas pretty early about at least some of that a cursory knowledge of the world the work other countries they they don't have that they don't have norms parents can't tell them how to choose a job they never had to whereas you know my father and mother could at least give me some guidance about how to think about doing this have you gotten much pushback for the gender or sex work that you've done have I gotten what much pushback in terms of the sex difference um not that much I mean the biggest one and again I alluded to is gender is not dichotomous right and so how what can you do about that and if I want to help people how can I even think about doing that for somebody that doesn't want to fall into these one of these two groups comfortably and I hope the field kind of can start picking that up and particularly now we could start getting some more information and getting larger samples on the internet I think we can start making real head headway in that area the other one is again definitely should issue okay so if we can get a whole lot of people who do identify as non-binary what does that mean can we just keep them can we just have three groups and that that's going to be a valid representation my guess is no but that's just my guess um yeah I mean just my intuition which is very immature is that this is like we should we could think about this more as a continuum yeah well but then so and then kind of how do you divide that up you know right kind of looking at it that way and would a continuum be a valid representation because I know certainly I know some people that do not view themselves on a continuum I could have this continuum but I'm here I'm on a different line okay um so I am more than just somewhere between these two so you you sent me a few papers that I that and resources that I'll link to in the show notes but are there any other resources that you want listeners to know about who are interested in what we've been talking about oh god I don't know um and I guess so I believe that all of the tools that you've created are available for free right well it and when my sad story is is the pgi is remarkably you know I've had that up online for a long time and then I got it all fancy and I gucced it up and made it pretty sexy um and it was on the ASU server and they promised me five years that they supported and they didn't and so it's now down and um so it currently isn't up anywhere um much to my should read so but the the pencil and paper version oh yeah those are yeah is available for free oh yeah no any of this you want to use it go ahead um and the kids one yeah you can get you can get all the stuff on on my website um you can just download it you can't take the test um but you know it's these are there to use I think the you know the kids version the pgi has some real short ones you could use in research you could add it in there the children's scale you can do oh oh I one of the things I was playing with toward the end there was and I built this into the pgi too um response latency um so I assessed how long it took you to respond to the items um and I found that it did correlate to you know roughly you're liking or disliking of an occupation but it added a lot of reliability to my assessment it didn't do anything different I thought maybe it would be like implicit assessment it would really capture something different not didn't capture anything different but it was like asking the same item twice so I found that I could cut if I took account of response latency I could cut the scale in half and get the same reliability so because how quickly or slowly I answered the question is tells me what so you know if you think about it if I'm real sure about something um fast right it's going to be one or seven or whatever quickly so if I do a one or seven fast uh that tells me this is a strong response if I take a while it's kind of like well you know think about it do I really like that hmm maybe so and so the and this is true with many things they've in response stuff but they haven't talked about in terms of the actual assessments before um so you can use this as a way of really cutting down lengths of questionnaires got it so like for if if it's uh realistic or you know things that if I write that if I rate that as a seven I'll also likely rate it really quickly so that sort of like becomes two data points which is equivalent to roughly having two items yeah that's pretty cool so you can roughly cut the scale in half wow which is great so um great so I will I will link all of these things Terry I cannot tell you how much I appreciate this this is wonderful oh god it's fun to do ladies and gentlemen dr Terry Tracy that's a wrap one hour conversation about interests as I noted at the top of the show it'd be much appreciated if you spread the word to anyone else who you think might enjoy it until next time[Music]