Title of Dissertation: AN INVESTIGATION OF PERSON-ENVIRONMENT CONGRUENCE

This study tested a hypothesis derived from Holland’s (1997) theory of personality and environment that congruence between person and environment would influence satisfaction with doctoral training environments and career certainty. Doctoral students ’ (N =292) vocational interests were measured using questions from the Interest Item Pool, and they provided ratings of their satisfaction with training and certainty about their career choices. Professors (N = 106) described the doctoral training environments of these students using the Position Classification Inventory (PCI). Additional classifications of the training environments were accomplished using the Environmental Assessment Technique (EAT) and the Dictionary of Holland Occupation Codes-Third Edition (DHOC). Traditional congruence indexes revealed only small correlations of P-E congruence with satisfaction of training environment and no significant correlations of P-E congruence with career certainty. Congruence indexes based on environmental measurement using the PCI were not better predictors of satisfaction or career certainty than were indexes based on the EAT or DHOC