PERSONALITY AND VOCATIONAL INTERESTS - THE RELATION OF HOLLANDS 6 INTEREST DIMENSIONS TO 5 ROBUST DIMENSIONS OF PERSONALITY

Relations between interest-based personality dimensions from J. L. Hol land's (1985a) theory of vocational personalities and 5 robust factors of personality (R. R. McCrae & O. P. John, 1992) were examined. Resul ts for 479 male and 246 female U.S. Navy trainees imply that the 6 the oretical scales of the Vocational Preference Inventory and 20 scales o f the NEO Personality Inventory share 2 to 4 significant factors. Soci al and Enterprising vocational preferences were positively correlated with Extraversion; Investigative and Artistic preferences were positiv ely correlated with Openness; and Conventional preferences were correl ated with Conscientiousness. Examinations of correlations for instrume nts with scales that are assumed to represent facets of 5 general pers onality factors usually supported these interpretations. Despite their regularity, the vocational-personality correlations were too low to s uggest that either form of assessment is a dependable substitute for t he other.