Die Bedeutung der Interessenkongruenz für die Schulzufriedenheit in der beruflichen Oberstufe

Interest congruence is an important predictor of individual experiences and behavior in post-school occupational contexts. The importance of interest congruence in school contexts with specific activity demands has hardly been investigated to date, even though these offers have been introduced with the aim of giving the pupils the opportunity to test their vocational interests. The present study investigates the effect of interest congruence on school satisfaction in vocational secondary schools. Our analyses were based on circumplex modelling of individual interest profiles. The interest profiles were used as predictors of school satisfaction in multi-level models. Our results support the congruence hypothesis, as the proximity of the dominant individual interests to the central activity demands of the vocational schools predicted higher satisfaction. This effect was also robust to central covariates (gender, cognitive ability and personality dispositions). As expected, this effect was not found in the general secondary school. As a conclusion, vocational secondary schools seem to enable the testing of vocational interests.