Current Assessment Methods of Investigator's Psychological Readiness for Professional Activities: Improvement Perspectives

Abstract

Despite the fact that this category of psychological readiness for professional activity is actively considered and researched, scientists do not have a consensus on its semantic content. This situation complicates the development and implementation of the methodological apparatus. Summarising the theoretical analysis, it can be noted that the intersection of the concepts of “psychological readiness” and “professional activity of an investigator” is insignificant. The foregoing allows us to formulate the purpose of the article, which is to find out the ways to improve the assessment of investigators' psychological readiness for professional activity. The aim involves the following tasks: 1) to identify the structure of investigators' psychological readiness for professional activity; 2) to select and analyse the available psychodiagnostic methods aimed at identifying the level of psychological readiness for professional activity of representatives of high-risk professions; 3) to find out the prospects for improving the methodology for assessing investigators' psychological readiness for professional activity. The research methodology included the following steps: 1) analysis of the available options for the structure of psychological readiness as such; 2) substantiation of the author's approach to the structure of psychological readiness of investigators for professional activity; 3) selection of psychodiagnostic methods used to determine the psychological readiness of individuals for high-risk professional activity; 4) finding a correspondence between the parameters studied using psychodiagnostic methods and the components of the structure of psychological readiness of investigators for professional activity; 5) mathematical and statistical analysis of the effectiveness of the psychological readiness of investigators for professional activity. The theoretical and methodological analysis of the research allowed us to develop an approach to considering the structure of psychological readiness of investigators for professional activity. The structure of psychological readiness includes five components: 1) intellectual and cognitive; 2) emotional and volitional: 3) behavioural and reactive; 4) moral and ethical; 5) value-evaluation. The study revealed that psychodiagnostic techniques used in the practice of identifying psychophysiological characteristics of representatives of high-risk professions characterise the structure of investigators' psychological readiness for professional activity unevenly. The behavioural and reactive component can be measured most adequately, and the emotional and volitional component more or less adequately. The degree of representation of methods for determining the peculiarities of the value-evaluation component is insufficient. The possibility of measuring the intellectual-cognitive and moral-ethical components is extremely low and as such does not reflect real needs.