Assessing Career Certainty and Choice Status

The CDS emerged from work beginning in a graduate seminar and evolved from an initial 14 items to its current 19-item format. Items one and two comprise the Certainty Scale and assess respondents’ decidedness about, respectively, their career and academic major choices. Respondents rate themselves on these two items according to their levels of certainty and perceived comfort with and ability to implement their choices. Items 318 make up the Indecision Scale which assesses reasons for career indecision and correlates negatively with the Certainty Scale. Item 19 offers an open-ended response opportunity to clarify or elaborate on responses to the 18 preceding items. Osipow et al. (1976) designed the CDS primarily for high school and college students although, as Slaney (1988a) notes, it has been adapted successfully for use with graduate students, medical students, and non-traditional female college students. Extensive evidence exists for the reliability as well as the construct and concurrent validity of the measure (Slaney, 1988b). Counselors use the CDS to efficiently gauge clients’ levels of decidedness, reasons for indecision, and to plan specific interventions based on item responses.