Home › Historical IQ Tests › Strong Vocational Interest Blank

Public Domain · 1927

Strong Vocational Interest Blank: Foundational interest inventory

The first major standardized interest inventory and the foundational instrument of modern career assessment. Edward K. Strong Jr. at Stanford spent 14 years developing the test, which compared a subject's interest patterns to those of successful people in different occupations. Modern descendants - the Strong Interest Inventory (1985), Holland Self-Directed Search (1971), and Campbell Interest and Skill Survey (1992) - all trace back to the 1927 Strong VIB.

Take the TestRead About the Test

About the Strong Vocational Interest Blank

By the early 1920s, vocational guidance was emerging as a professional field but lacked good measurement instruments. Aptitude tests measured what someone could do; nothing systematic measured what they would want to do. Edward K. Strong Jr. at Stanford set out to fill this gap.

Strong's empirical approach was novel: instead of asking subjects what occupations they liked, he asked them about 400 specific likes, dislikes, and preferences spanning activities, hobbies, school subjects, types of people, and so on. He then administered the same questionnaire to large samples of established professionals in many different occupations - lawyers, engineers, doctors, ministers, accountants, etc. The pattern of likes and dislikes of successful members of each occupation became the empirical 'occupational scale' for that occupation.

A new test-taker's responses could then be compared to each occupational scale: a high score on the 'engineer' scale meant the person's interest pattern resembled that of successful engineers - regardless of whether they had any specific interest in engineering itself. This was a methodological breakthrough.

The 1927 Strong VIB had scales for about 20 occupations; subsequent revisions expanded to 100+ scales. The test was administered to millions of US high-school and college students through the 1960s. The 1985 Strong Interest Inventory revision (still in active commercial use through CPP) uses the same empirical methodology with modern occupational scales.

About this interactive version: Strong VIB items and modern revisions are copyrighted. This page documents history and methodology.

The 1 subtests

#1
400 interest items + ~100 occupational scales Subject rates ~400 specific activities, hobbies, school subjects, and types of people. Pattern is compared against occupational reference groups.
Copyrighted

Take the full 100-item test

Original 1927 Strong Vocational Interest Blank (SVIB) by E.K. Strong Jr. Asks subjects to rate interest (Like / Indifferent / Dislike) in occupations, school subjects, activities. The original had 400 items; we use 100 representative items spanning all 4 sections.

No data leaves your browser.

About these items: These Strong Vocational Interest Blank items are originally-written reconstructions in the tradition of the original 1927 test, NOT verbatim copies of the historical items. Where the original is a 1-on-1 oral or physical-apparatus test (e.g., examiner shows a card, child draws a shape), we have adapted the format to self-administered multiple choice.

Sample Items (Illustrative)

Items are presented as statements or questions about preferences and interests, with responses typically indicating levels of agreement or interest. These responses are then compared to established patterns for various occupational groups to assess vocational interests.

Sample 1 · Interest Items
Do you enjoy reading detective novels?
Example response: Yes
Sample 2 · Interest Items
Would you like to work in a laboratory conducting experiments?
Example response: No
Sample 3 · Occupational Scales
How appealing do you find the idea of managing a retail store?
Example response: Moderately appealing
Sample 4 · Occupational Scales
Do you prefer working with numbers and calculations over creative writing?
Example response: Yes
Sample 5 · Interest Items
Are you interested in learning to play a musical instrument?
Example response: Yes

These are illustrative samples, not actual items from the protected test.

Source

All test materials and historical content on this page are transcribed from:

Edward K. Strong Jr. (1927). Strong Vocational Interest Blank.

The Strong VIB and its modern descendants remain under active CPP (Consulting Psychologists Press) copyright. We document its history and significance.

Cite this page

This page is part of the Historical IQ Tests Archive. Editorial content, transcription notes, and curation are released under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0). Public-domain primary sources retain their public-domain status. BibTeX · RIS

Historical test materials are obsolete and are not valid modern IQ assessments. This page is preserved for educational, research, and historiographic purposes.

Looking for a contemporary IQ test?

The instrument documented above is a historical document. Modern IQ scoring uses contemporary norms (mean 100, SD 15). Our free full IQ test is available separately.