CROSS-CULTURAL VALIDATION OF AN ACADEMIC INTEREST INVENTORY

The primary focus of this investigation was the cross-cultural validation of an academic interest inventory. The instrument chosen for cross-cultural application was the Milwaukee Academic Interest Inventory (MAII). The MAII was modified for use in Swaziland, a small South East African country. The revised inventory was named the Academic Interest Inventory (AII).;To revise the MAII, five items were deleted and nineteen others were rephrased in order to make the item set culturally appropriate for use in Swaziland. The Swaziland sample consisted of 891 AII records of 1975 high school graduates and the USA sample consisted of 2166 MAII records of the 1971 Temple University freshmen.;Five interpretable factors were extracted from each set of data. To determine the similarity of the factor structures for the two samples, congruency coefficients for the two sets of factor loadings were computed. The coefficients of factors bearing the same names ranged from .88 to .91. This result supported the existence of the same underlying interest dimensions across the two different cultures.;The validity of the AII in predicting choices of vocations was tested through a multiple-group discriminant analysis. The five interest factors were used to predict membership in eight curricular areas. There were 579 records that were identified in the Swaziland Training Report of 1977, an annual report that provides information of all Swaziland nationals in academic and technical training programs. Five significant discriminant functions were obtained; the value of Wilk's lambda was .08 (p < .001). The first two functions were interpretable, and accounted for 80 percent of the between group variance. A classification of the sample cases into the eight vocational areas using the obtained discriminant equations resulted in 70 percent correct classifications.;The purposes of this study were as follows: (1)To identify the interest factors underlying AII item responses in a Swaziland sample; (2)to compare the factorial structure of the MAII responses in a Swaziland sample, and (3)to examine the empirical validity of the AII in the Swaziland sample by relating interest scores with choice of occupational area.;The findings in this study provide evidence of the existence of five basis interest factors in the AII, an invariance of these interest factors across cultures and the validity of the factorial scales to discriminate among vocational choices.