Washington, July 6 (IANS) Matching the profile of interests of a person in various works with skills required for a particular job could be a better way to evaluate a his/her suitability for a particular job, a new research suggests.
Psychological scientist Christopher Nye of the Bowling Green University and colleagues from the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign, US, used a technique called meta-analysis to carry out the study.
Meta-analysis allowed them to pool the findings from existing studies on vocational interests and analyse the body of research as a whole, the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science reports.
Nye and his team hypothesised that it was not a person’s overall interest in a particular kind of work but how their profile of interests across various types of work matches with the profile of skills and tasks involved in a particular job that mattered, according to a Green statement.
They surmised that this match – known as person-environment fit – would be a much better predictor of performance on the job or in school than the general interest measures used in some previous studies.
The main finding of the meta-analysis, based on 60 studies from 1942 to 2011, involving 15,301 participants, confirmed their hypothesis. While overall interests were moderately correlated with performance and persistence at work and in school, measures that accounted for the person-environment fit were stronger predictors of performance than interest scores alone.
