Kitson's Vocational Hexagon: A Brief History

The author thanks John Krumboltz for locating recent references to Kitson's work in the literature. This essay is revised from one originally published through the newsletter of the Career Development Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association, and was written while the author was employed by the Ball Foundation.

This is a brief historical note to assign priority for the creation of a vocational hexagon to Harry Dexter Kitson. Everyone involved the career development field seems familiar with Holland's (1997) hexagon, applied by him and his colleagues then at ACT (Holland, Whitney, Cole, & Richards, 1969) to organize his six typological orientations. Holland's hexagonal model is probably the most widely applied of any single idea from a career development theory, given its world-wide use to organize the results of millions of interest inventories and measures of self-rated abilities. However, Holland's was not our field's first hexagon. That honor falls to Kitson, who in 1929 proposed a "vocational hexagon showing the points of view from which a vocational should be studied" (1937, p. 40); Figure 1 shows Kitson's hexagon.

Figure 1. Kitson's (1929) hexagon. He proposed examining the characteristics of occupations from six perspectives, each represented as a side of the hexagon. Adapted with permission from the publisher.

The six points of view that Kitson assigned to the faces of his hexagon were Social, Physical, Mental, Economic, Moral, and Physiological. Of these, four arguably have associations to some of Holland's six types: Kitson's Social to Holland's Social; Kitson's Physical to Holland's Realistic; Kitson's Mental to Holland's Investigative; and Kitson's Economic to Holland's Enterprising. Neither Holland's (1997) Conventional nor Artistic types appear to have analogs in Kitson's model.

Of course, Kitson's and Holland's hexagons are in many respects different. Kitson used his categories only as a means for representing the various features of occupations that merited attention from the individual preparing to choose a career. However, the big difference between Kitson's and Holland's hexagons is that Holland cited hard data to support his model.

Today Kitson's work is only infrequently cited in the career development literature (e.g., Cramer & Herr, 1981; Westbrook, Sanford, Gilleland, Fleenor, & Merwin, 1988). That Kitson is so little remembered in unfortunate, because he provided for the profession both scholarly leadership (he was Donald Super's doctoral advisor and served as editor of the profession's early journals) and political leadership (as an influential leader of the National Vocational Guidance Association). Kitson was a creative, visual thinker who used visual metaphors and iconic organizers (see especially Kitson, 1937) to model his thought for students (of guidance). There may be other good ideas in his work that contemporary counselors might still glean, such as whether it is possible to create vocational interests through engagement in simulated work activities (Kitson, 1942), in which Kitson's work antedated subsequent investigators' work on the relations between job simulations and interests (e.g., Helms & Williams, 1973; Krumboltz, 1971; see Goldman, 1971, p. 30). Those engaged in interventions related to the transition from school to work (or education to careers) might wish to read his thoughts on the subject of predicting vocational success (e.g., Kitson, 1925, 1928, 1937, 1948, 1958).

Although Holland never cited Kitson's hexagon, he was almost certainly familiar with some of his work during the period in which he began to formulate his theory. However, there no reason to presume that Holland was familiar with Kitson's hexagon in 1969 when he and his colleagues developed their own. Holland (1997) certainly has been charitable enough through acknowledgments of earlier theorists (pp. 6-7), and he is among the most assiduous of psychologists in citations. (His current theory statement provides 43 pages of references, coincidentally the same as that provided by Crites in his monumental 1969 review of the discipline.)

In the end, Kitson only came close to what we think of as "the hexagon." He left the idea lying fallow for others to claim, and in the mid-1960s Holland and his colleagues at ACT discovered some puzzling consistencies in the correlations between his measures of six personal orientations. The rest, as they say, was history.

References

Cramer, S. H., & Herr, E. L. (1981). A half century of similarities and differences in vocational guidance. Vocational Guidance Quarterly, 30, 157-165.

Goldman, L. (1971). Using tests in counseling (2nd ed.). Santa Monica, CA: Goodyear.

Helms, S. T., & Williams, G. D. (1973). An experimental study of the reactions of high school students to simulated jobs. (Research Report No. 161). Baltimore, MD: Center for Social Organization of Schools, John Hopkins University. (ERIC Document No. ED 087 882.)

Holland, J. L. (1997). Making vocational choices: A theory of vocational personalities and work environments (3rd ed.). Odessa, FL: Psychological Assessment Resources.

Holland, J. L., Whitney, D. R., Coles, N. S., & Richards, J. M., Jr. (1969). An empirical occupational classification derived from a theory of personality and intended for practice and research. (ACT Research Report No. 29). Iowa City, IA: The American College Testing Program.

Kitson, H. D. (1925). The psychology of vocational adjustment. Philadelphia: Lippincott.

Kitson, H. D. (1928). Trends in vocational guidance. In E. A. Lee (Ed.), Objectives and problems of vocational education (pp. 287-310). New York: McGraw-Hill.

Kitson, H. D. (1929). How to find the right vocation. New York: Harper Brothers.

Kitson, H. D. (1937). I find my vocation (rev. ed.). New York: McGraw Hill. Kitson, H. D. (1942). Creating vocational interests. Occupations, 20, 567-571.

Kitson, H. D. (1948). Can we predict vocational success? Occupations, 26, 539-541.

Kitson, H. D. (1958). Psychology in vocational adjustment. Personnel and Guidance Journal, 36, 314-319.

Krumboltz, J. D. (1971). Job experience kits. Chicago, IL: Science Research Associates.

Westbrook, B. W., Sanford, E., Gilleland, K., Fleenor, J., & Merwin, G. (1988). Career maturity in grade 9: The relationship between accuracy of self-appraisal and ability to appraise career-relevant capabilities of others. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 32, 269-283.