At age 23, participants were interviewed and responded to paper-and-pencil questions about their work experiences, including their employment history and their plans for future education/employment. Measures and audiotaped interviews were then coded for the degree to which each participant showed reflectivity about his/her career plans, the degree to which s/he had engaged in exploration of potential career opportunities, and the degree to which his/her thinking about job or career goals showed maturity on separate 5-point unidimensional Likert-type scales. Interrater reliabilities (intraclass correlations) for two raters on these scales ranged from .74 to .84. Scores on these scales were composited to form a Work Competence index. Past research linking this index to the quality of middle childhood peer competence, but not to the quality of adolescent relationships, provides evidence for its convergent and divergent validity (Collins & van Dulmen, 2006).
