Development of Career Guidance and Counseling Needs Scale: a Study from Pakistan

Abstract Career Guidance and Counseling Needs Scale ( CGCNS ) was developed to assess career related needs of students. Initially 143 items were generated from verbatim of university students who participated in qualitative exploratory interviews conducted earlier. Item pool was shortened to 90 items and 67 items respectively after two successive revisions. Content validity was established by expert review from 10 experts resulting in a 57-items scale. For standardization, CGCNS was administered to 480 (451 after data cleaning) public sector university students selected through stratified random sampling. Demographic Sheet, Perceived Stress Scale, and Career Decision-Making Indicators Scale were used for establishing validity. Through EFA , four factors were generated titled Career Foresight, Career Difficulties, Career Dissonance, and Career-Related Self-Awareness. Final CGCNS had 41 items. Alpha reliability and split-half reliability was 0.88 and 0.80 (p < .001) respectively. Convergent validity was 0.76 and concurrent validity was 0.70 (p < .001). Pakistan and other similar countries could benefit from CGCNS .