Validation of an adapted French form of the Career Adapt-Abilities Scale in four Francophone countries

Abstract

This study presents the validation of a French version of the Career Adapt-Abilities Scale in four Francophone countries. The aim was to re-analyze the item selection and then compare this newly developed French-language form with the international form 2.0. Exploratory factor analysis was used as a tool for item selection, and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) verified the structure of the CAAS French-language form. Measurement equivalence across the four countries was tested using multi-group CFA. Adults and adolescents (N=1,707) participated from Switzerland, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France. Items chosen for the final version of the CAAS French-language form are different to those in the CAAS international form 2.0 and provide an improvement in terms of reliability. The factor structure is replicable across country, age, and gender. Strong evidence for metric invariance and partial evidence for scalar invariance of the CAAS French-language form across countries is given. The CAAS French-language and CAAS international form 2.0 can be used in a combined form of 31 items. The CAAS French-language form will certainly be interesting for practitioners using interventions based on the life design paradigm or aiming at increasing career adaptability .

Relationships of career adaptabilities with explicit and implicit self-concepts

“…The convergent and divergent analyses in relation to explicit measures of personality and self-esteem (H1-H4) provided support for the instruments's construct validity. Moreover, the high similarity in terms of gender differences, with the results on other Francophone populations (Johnston et al, 2013), or regarding the pattern of correlations with van Vianen et al (2012) study on students, has important implications in terms of replicability (Asendorpf et al, 2013). From this perspective, our study offered new evidence for advocating the genuineness of the career adaptability construct and its individual differences correlates.…”

Validation of the German version of the Career Adapt-Abilities Scale and its relation to orientations to happiness and work stress

“…Items with the highest correlation were paired creating three homogenous parcels per scale, and then using the mean score of the two items in the analysis (Rogers & Schmitt, 2004). This technique provided good model fit for the CAAS French-language form (Johnston, et al, 2013) and thus we tested this strategy with the German-language form. This model proved to have similar fit to the model with modification indices as seen in Table 2.…”

“…For example, unemployed individuals respond to job loss with increased levels of adapt-ability (Rossier, in press), and the transition from work to retirement prompted the display of adapt-ability (Ebberwein et al, 2004). Further, adolescents in France, Belgium, and Switzerland have different levels of career adapt-ability (Johnston et al, 2013). It seems then that adapt-abilities are not independent of context, and that interventions aimed at the development of career adaptabilities may result in favorable personal and work outcomes.…”

Career Adaptability and Vocational Identity of Commercial Apprentices in the German Dual System

“…Savickas' conceptualisation of career adaptability was measured using the German version of the Career Adapt-Abilities Scale (Johnston et al 2013a). It consists of 24 items assigned to four subscales measuring concern, control, curiosity and confidence.…”