“A Little More Than Kin, and Less Than Kind”: Basic Interests in Vocational Research and Career Counseling

The history of basic interests helps explain their under‐use as a meaningful dimension in the interpretation of career inventories. Research and reflection support new attention to basic interests for four reasons: (a) basic interests may be more optimal cognitive categories than other levels of classification, (b) the RIASEC arrangement of general occupational types may not adequately represent the complexity of the interest space, (c) the interest space itself may be differently conceptualized by men and by women, and (d) the realities of work in this technological era are fundamentally different than they were when occupational inventories such as the Strong Interest Inventory™ (Campbell, 1977) were designed.