Chapter 4: Assessing Work Values

“Whatever exists at all exists in some amount. To know it thoroughly involves knowing its quantity as well as its quality.” So said E. L. Thorndike (1918). Thus, as Hartung (in this volume) has made a convincing case for the existence as well as the utility of the concept of work values, a number of measures of work values have appeared in the vocational psychology literature. This chapter reviews the origins and development of two pioneering work values assessments and attempts to detail their impact on the continuing study of the role of work values in career development.

Vocational psychology has manifested no little interest in the concept of values. Only a few years after E. K. Strong published the 1928 mimeo manual for his “Blank” (Campbell, 1971, p. 348), Vernon and Allport (1931) introduced their Study of Values, which they characterized as a personality assessment. A revision (Allport, Vernon, & Lindsey, 1960) became popular in vocational counseling. Conceived around the writing of Spranger (1928), the measure reported the relative importance of six values: Theoretical, Economic, Aesthetic, Social, Political, and Religious. It is little used today, but generally regarded as the prototype for today’s value assessments.