The object of this study is to assess informative possibilities of some technical indicators of the Test of Photos of Professions (BBT – Berufsbilder test), a projective method to clarify professional inclination, proposed by Martin Achtnich. This psychological evaluation technique is composed of 96 photos of professionals, performing various types of activities. The test subject classifies the photos into three groups: positive (agreeable), negative (disagreeable) and indifferent (neutral). Among those chosen positively, five preferences are chosen and a story is developed that includes them, an activity that is requested two times during the Vocational Guidance process: in the beginning (or middle) and at the end of the intervention. In this study, 160 stories were created by 80 youths, between 15 and 20 years of age, in public and private schools in a mid-sized Brazilian city. The stories were compared in three analytical categories: protagonist, professional conflict and resolution. The results were submitted to Wilcoxon nonparametric statistical analysis (p < .05), significant and relevant indicators of resolution being found in the process of occupational choice. This technical resource was shown, from this empirical evidence, to be promising for use in evaluation of intervention processes of Vocational Guidance.

Literature has shown that, nowadays, a multidimensional approach to decision-making has become prioritized. The Careers Factor Inventory (CFI) is, in fact, a multidimensional measurement instrument for evaluating career indecision, which may be useful in the diagnosis of adaptation behaviors in terms of career decision versus indecision. This study emerges as a follow-up to a previous study which used the CFI on a sample of university students in which this measurement instrument was found to be capable of distinguishing Low decided vs. Highly decided groups and to evaluate the discriminatory capacity of the CFI scales. It is the aim, here, to further analyse the results obtained in such study with a view to grounding the importance of the use of this Inventory as an instrument for distinguishing people who present different decision levels in relation to their careers. In this study, 494 university students from a number of higher education establishments and courses are part of the afore mentioned Low decided and Highly decided groups. The collected data were analysed by means of Discrete Discriminant Analysis models and corroborate the discriminant power of the Inventory and its use as a diagnostic instrument in the psychological intervention of career counseling and development.