The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship among career interest profiles as estimated by the Self-Directed Search (SDS), the Strong Campbell Interest Inventory (SCII) and individual's self-estimates (SE). The thesis of this study was that college students can accurately estimate the scores they would receive by taking the SDS and SCII when given only a brief set of instructions.

The SDS and SCII were administered to a purposive sampling of 117 college students composed of liberal arts, science, business, engineering and undecided majors from the four undergraduate classes. Information concerning students' socioeconomic background, educational aspirations and career certainty level was gathered in addition to other demographic information.

SE, SDS and SCII data were compared using the cluster procedure subprogram of the Statistical Analysis System, and the Spearman rank-order correlation, the Pearson-product-moment-correlation, and the crosstabulation sub-programs of the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences.

Comparisons were made between the occupational theme scores derived from SE, SDS and SCII, and between basic interest scale scores obtained from SE and SCII. Occupational theme scores possessed high intercorrelation coefficients across assessment devices. A visual comparison of the intercorrelations among the six themes for each assessment device revealed a strong similarity among the scores produced by each instrument. In addition, high point and secondary, point coding possessed a high degree of interrelationship across assessment methods. The cluster procedure, however, failed to show any relationship among the results of the SDS, SCII or SE theme scores, a finding attributed to an artifact of scaling. SCII basic interest scale scores correlated highly with SE basic interest scale scores, and the cluster analysis procedure supported the correlational findings by showing similarities among SE and SCII basic interest scale dendrograms. In addition, the SE, SDS and SCII scores were descriptively analyzed and compared with one another and with demographic characteristics.

Major findings in the study indicate that for college students: 1. SE, SDS and SCII result in similar theme scores and summary codes, and SE and SCII result in similar BIS scores. 2. Students most likely to have SE and inventoried scores in agreement were males from higher socioeconomic backgrounds, possessed higher academic degree ambitions, and showed a high level of agreement between their SE and expressed career goal high point themes. 3. Certainty of career plan, high point career theme, age, academic major, year in college, and grade point average have no relationship with agreement among SE, SDS and SCII scores. 4. College counselors may wish to consider the advantages and limitations of using standardized interest measures since it appears that similar scores can be achieved by asking students to self-estimate their interests.