Revisiting The Vocational Outcome Expectations Scale: A Network Psychometric Validation of The Revised Five-Point Likert Version

The revised vocational outcome expectations scale measures the expected outcomes of an individual while pursuing a goal. The original Likert ‎scale-based response categories of this tool are increased from four to five by including the neutral option. The tool is validated on a fresh ‎population of high school students belonging to the North Eastern state of Tripura, India, using the Network Psychometrics approach appropriate for the ordinal data type. The purpose was to improve the quality of the responses obtained from the tool, enhance its psychometric ‎robustness by validating it through a network approach, and increase its cross-cultural validity over a fresh population in a novel context. Data ‎was collected through a stratified random sampling technique from schools representing all eight districts of the Tripura state. The sample size ‎was 568 secondary school students (Boys = 286, Girls = 282). Data analysis was conducted using appropriate packages in R ver. 4.4.2. ‎Exploratory graph analysis revealed a single cluster of the construct, consistent with previous studies, with all nodes displaying robust structural-‎al consistency of 0.938 within the cluster. Rationale for accepting the estimates of ordinal confirmatory factor analysis, like CFI robust, ‎srmr_bentler, tli. robust and RMSEA. robust, as obtained in this study, is provided along with the statistical details related to the regularized ‎network structure, centrality indices, and edge-weight accuracy. The CS-coefficient is found to be 0.362, indicating acceptable stability of the ‎network. The revised vocational outcome expectations scale is found to be a robust instrument among the population of secondary school ‎students‎.