Barrier to Employment Success Inventory (BESI)

Purpose:

The Barrier to Employment Success Inventory, Second Edition helps identify personal barriers to getting or keeping a job. The BESI is a self-scored and interpreted inventory that helps unemployed individuals (or those unable to keep a job) and vocational counselors identify major obstacles to employment success. It is intended to open a discussion about employment barriers and how to address them. The BESI was developed primarily for less educated adults.

Population: Adult and teenage job seekers and career planners. People preparing to look for a job, who have not found a job, or who are unable to keep a job. Teenagers and adults with at least an eighth grade reading level.

Publication Date: 2002.

Description:

The BESI is a 50-item paper-and-pencil or online assessment designed for self-administration, self-scoring, and self-interpretation. It can be used individually or in groups. Administration takes about 10-15 minutes. Items are rated on a 4-point scale (from “of no concern” to “of great concern”) directly in the inventory booklet. Responses for items within a category are summed, with higher scores indicating more concern with barriers. Color coding indicates which item response scores are summed and carries through from item response to scoring to interpretation.

Five Categories of Barriers:

• Personal and Financial:
• Emotional and Physical: The E scale measures barriers stemming from feelings of insecurity, low self-esteem, and physical problems. Respondents with high scores on this scale are concerned with maintaining their health or a positive attitude. They may also be concerned about dealing with the anger and depression associated with unemployment or underemployment.
• Career Decision-Making and Planning:
• Job-Seeking Knowledge:
• Training and Education: In the Training and Education scale, possible barriers may be lack of a high school diploma or needed technical school training.

Development:

The BESI’s development stemmed from research by Miller and Oetting (1977), who generated a list of 37 barriers to employment clustered into four groups plus three single-item barriers. Miller and Oetting identified these barriers from a literature review and consultation with disadvantaged clients.

The BESI author developed 100 items based on Miller and Oetting’s work, a literature review, and consultation with employment and career counselors. Case studies, interviews with unemployed adults, and a review of the literature on job search programs informed inventory item development. Professional counselors reviewed the items for appropriateness, clarity, and category placement, reducing the pool to approximately 75 items. It is unclear how those 75 items were reduced to the final 50.

A national-empirical method of test construction used a content-based approach to develop scales designed to measure constructs identified as barriers to the unemployed in research studies. Statements were designed to be realistic and were based on an initial pool of 100 statements found in the literature and input from employment and career counselors. Counselors categorized the statements, and the author discarded those that did not represent barriers to employment, reducing the statements from 100 to 75. How the final 50 statements, or items, were chosen from the 75 is not explained.

Technical Information:

The BESI scales and items reflect some of the concerns and barriers to finding and maintaining employment encountered by adults in a handful of studies. Traditional methods were used in test development.

All data used in developing the inventory and providing evidence of its validity and reliability appear to be based on a single sample of 85 to 150 unemployed adults participating in government-sponsored job training programs. Basic descriptive data is reported in the administrator’s manual. However, because there is little available documentation of the test development, norming sample, and validation evidence, evaluating test development and quality is difficult. The lack of information on data collection, sample composition, administrative conditions, and respondent characteristics makes the data less useful.

Commentary:

The BESI is attractive, user-friendly, and easy to understand. It may be most useful as a structured interview or intake tool for vocational counselors who want some information about clients before beginning training or providing services. Test takers are instructed on how to compute and plot scores for each scale and are then provided with some prompts to help them identify specific obstacles and ways to address them. However, interpretation may be problematic for some of the adults the instrument is designed to assist.

There is some data on the reliability and consistency of scores attained from a sample of adults in one government-sponsored training program. However, there is not enough information about the data collection, sample characteristics, data analysis methods, and test development procedures to allow test users to determine how useful this inventory would be with specific individuals and groups. There is no predictive validation evidence and minimal construct-related evidence.

While potentially useful as an intact or structured interview tool for experienced vocational counselors who understand the assessment’s limitations, independent use by unemployed workers could be potentially harmful because there is no evidence to support generalizability across unemployed workers with different levels of education, training, and other special characteristics.

Summary:

The BESI is a self-scored and interpreted inventory designed to assist unemployed workers and vocational counselors identify major obstacles to employment success. The inventory reflects barriers or problems encountered by adults seeking and maintaining employment from a single intervention program, Starting Points. The inventory is relatively quick to complete and contains 50 items, evenly divided among five scales that reflect different types of barriers: Training and Education, Job Seeking, etc. Reliability is quite high, but empirical validity evidence is lacking. As a tool to encourage people to start thinking about what keeps them from finding employment, the tool has face and content validity, is inexpensive, and provides immediate results. Suggestions for overcoming barriers are listed, but these suggestions are simplistic and possibly impractical to implement without the assistance of a counselor.

References:

• The Sixteenth Mental Measurements Yearbook
• The Nineteenth Mental Measurements Yearbook