Permanence of interest scores over 22 years

Abstract

Several groups of students were tested on the Vocational Interest Blank at Stanford, as long ago as 1927. Since then the same persons have been re-tested several times and the two sets of scores for each individual correlated after each re-test. The median correlation between two sets of data on 228 individuals tested over an interval of 22 years was .75. Medians on other groups tested over intervals from one to nineteen years ranged from .67 to .88. The factors of age and time interval appear to be of equal importance in determining the correlations. The correlation between permanence and age with time interval partialed out was .818 between permanence and time interval with age partialed out was .812. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)