Sex and cultural differences in the factorial structure of the self-directed search

Holland's Self-Directed Search was administered to 247 male and 252 female high school students, aged 16 to 18 years, attending state schools in New Zealand. Principal factor analysis was used in an attempt to identify six orthogonal factors analogous to Holland's six personality types. The Social and Enterprising scales could not be split into two factors in either sample, and the Investigative and Realistic scales defined a single factor for the female students. Computed distances between pairs of the six personality types in five dimensional factorial space were compared with the relative ordering of the distances expected from Holland's hexagonal model. The positions of the types in space corresponded more closely with the model for the males than they did for the females. The results, in conjunction with those of similar studies in Israel and the United States, imply that the correspondence between some summary codes on the SDS and existing occupational classifications based on Holland's types may be less than perfect, particularly for females. Also, care should be taken when using codes on the SDS to calculate Holland's indices of “consistency,” especially for females.     

Use of orthographic structure and reading ability: What relationship?

Previous research has shown that good readers are superior to poor readers in their use of orthographic structure. The purpose of the present study was to assess the role of experience in determining these differences. Results showed that poor sixth-grade readers used orthographic structure to speed their matching judgments just as effectively as good sixth-grade readers. The apparent discrepancy in results between the present study and previous work is explained in terms of the “partial-information hypothesis” which states that the performance of good readers is superior to that of poor readers in situations which depend on the use of partial information. Support for this view was provided by the fact that good readers recognized significantly more items on a recognition test than did the poor readers.