Published scales have the advantage of being vetted, meaning that they are likely to provide reliable and reproducible results. Many of the scales include subscales that focus on different components of the target topic. You can choose to use only one or two subscales of a scale if the full scale is too long or doesn’t all target exactly what you need to measure.
Note: make sure you think carefully about the outcomes you hope to see with each scale. Some of these scales were developed for working populations or adults that are older developmentally than college students. Developmentally appropriate expectations for college students may need to be slightly different than the maximums of what is indicated by the scales.
On Calling, Work, and Purpose
For many of the scales below, a calling can be defined as an approach to work that reflects the belief that one’s career is a central part of a broader sense of purpose and meaning in life and is used to help others or advance the greater good in some fashion.
Authenticity Scale
Some subscales of this measure may be useful if you would like to measure students’ growth in confidence of their identity. The subscales include: authentic living, accepting external influences (scored as negative), and self-alienation.
Brief Calling Scale (BCS)
This scale assesses the degree to which participants perceive a calling in their career. While short, it still has subscales for both the presence of a calling and the search for a calling.
Calling Scale (CS)
The calling scale measures the degree to which participants felt a calling, defined as a “consuming, meaningful passion people experience toward a domain”. The authors recommend that items be answered according to a specific domain, and in the instrument was tested using the domains of music, art, business, and management.
Calling and Vocation Questionnaire (CVQ)
This scale includes subscales to measure transcendent summons (both presence of and search for), purposeful work (both presence of and search for), and prosocial orientation (both presence of and search for).
Claremont Purpose Scale (CPS)
Designed for use with adolescents, this scale gauges all three dimensions of the purpose construct, including goal-directedness, personal meaning, and a beyond-the-self orientation.
Faith at Work Scale (FWS)
This scale measures how influential individuals’ religious and spiritual beliefs are in their working lives. The FWS was designed for Judeo-Christian samples, but FWS items have shown applicability to various religious and nonreligious individuals through relationships with job satisfaction and organizational commitment. The subscales of the instrument include relationships, meaning, community, holiness, and giving.
Living Calling Scale (LCS)
The LCS is a unidimensional measure that contains six items assessing the extent to which participants’ current work contexts align with their callings.
Meaning in Life Questionnaire (MLQ)
This measure assess search for meaning in life and presence of meaning in life as two subscales.
Service Motivation Scale (SMS)
This six-question scale assesses orientation toward service to others in relation to career plans.
Work and Meaning Inventory (WAMI)
The work as meaning inventory contains subscales for positive meaning, meaning making through work, and greater good motivations. The subscale for greater good motivation may be particularly helpful.
On Virtues and Dispositions Important for Exploring Vocation
The following scales do not address vocation directly but explore things related to vocation or that facilitate vocational discernment.
Curiosity Assessment (5dc)
This assessment captures the bandwidth of curiosity and identifies four unique subgroups of curious people. Subscales are joyous exploration, deprivation sensitivity, stress tolerance, social curiosity, and thrill seeking.
Flourishing Scale
The flourishing scale includes questions that cover happiness and life satisfaction, mental and physical health, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, close social relationships, financial and materials stability. The “Flourish” measure is obtained by summing the scores from each of the first five domains.
Grit Scale
The Grit Scale measures an individual’s tendency to sustain interest in an effort toward very long-term goals. There are two sub-scales: perseverance of effort and consistency of Interests.
Intellectual Humility Scale
A 22-question self-report measure of intellectual humility. Subscales include independence of intellect and ego, openness to revising one’s viewpoint, respect for others’ viewpoints, and lack of intellectual overconfidence.
Prosocial Scale
This 25 question scale is a measure of tendency toward behaviors that benefit others.
Is there a standard scale that you use for vocation-related assessment that we could add to this page? Contact Rachael Baker, NetVUE director of professional development, at rbaker@cic.edu.