Assessing Occupational Mobility: The Validation of the Barriers to Occupational Change Scale (BOCS)

With increasing movement of adults from one occupational category to another, especially in occupations such as nursing and teaching, understanding why some workers are mobile and others are not becomes crucial to programs aimed at attracting and retaining workers in critical occupations. This paper describes the development of measures for assessing perceived barriers to occupational change. The development sample was 772 adults employed in a variety of organizations and distributed across numerous occupational categories. Thirty six items were generated from review of the psychological and sociological literatures on occupational choice and development. Nineteen items loaded on five empirically distinguishable factors. The resulting barriers-to-occupational-change subscales exhibit convergent and discriminant validity.