Increasing numbers of career-decided students in professional and graduate schools have difficulty choosing a specialty. To begin to examine this problem, a measure of specialty indecision was devised by changing the Career Decision Scale items to deal with specialty indecision rather than career indecision. The scale was then administered to 567 medical students along with measures of vocational development and exploratory behavior. Initial evaluation of the psychometric properties of the Specialty Indecision Scale indicate that it is internally consistent, relates more to specialty choice than to career choice, and inversely relates to both vocational development and exploratory behavior. A factor analysis of the scale items extracted four factors that reflect cognitive, conative, criterion, and implementation restraints on the decision-making process. The Specialty Indecision Scale seems to be useful for diagnostic and research purposes in the study and treatment of specialty indecision.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/25480/1/0000020.pd
