Assessing Perceptions of Career-Related Barriers: The Career Barriers Inventory

The number and type of barriers that one perceives can be a limiting factor in career choice and implementation, and the construct of perceived career barriers has been increasingly recognized as an important and useful explanatory variable in research regarding career choice. This article addresses the assessment of career barriers and includes two foci. First, we describe the development and subsequent revisions of the Career Barriers Inventory (CBI; Swanson & Daniels, 1995c; Swanson & Tokar, 1991b) and summarize empirical evidence from studies using the CBI. Second, we discuss how the construct of perceived barriers relates to the recently articulated social cognitive model of career development (Lent, Brown, & Hackett, 1994) and offer some suggestions for research and practice regarding assessment of career barriers.