The Influence of Attachment and Career Calling on Career Decision Self-Efficacy, College Adjustment, and Life Satisfaction in Undergraduate Students

Emphasizing purpose and meaning in work, career calling has experienced substantial growth in vocational research among college students due to beneficial effects on academic and life satisfaction. Application of vocational theory is needed and this study investigated calling from an integrated social cognitive career theory (SCCT) and attachment theory perspective. Using structural equation modeling in a sample of 433 students, competing theoretical models were tested. The alternative model best fit the data, finding anxious and avoidant attachment to have direct negative effects on career decision self-efficacy (CDSE), and college adjustment, and indirect negative effects on life satisfaction. Avoidant, but not anxious, attachment had a direct negative effect on career calling, which subsequently had direct positive effects on CDSE and college adjustment. CDSE and college adjustment both had positive direct effects on life satisfaction and mediated the positive effect of career calling. These results constitute original findings linking attachment and career calling, while also supporting the integration of career calling and SCCT. Insecure attachment may cause barriers to career calling development, CDSE, and college adjustment, while career calling may improve these variables and indirectly benefit life satisfaction among college students. Results may be particularly relevant to counseling psychologists and providers in university counseling. Theoretical, research, and practical applications are discussed

Career Decision Status, Career-Related Thinking, and Emotional Distress: A Structural Equation Model

The choosing of a college major or occupation is an important decision with which many individuals struggle. Prior research has suggested that difficulty choosing a major or occupation affects a majority of students entering college and stems from multiple sources including lack of information, insufficient learning experiences, and ineffective decision-making processes. Cognitive-behavioral theory has shown utility in working with a diverse set of difficulties and with diverse populations through the examination of the influence of thoughts and emotions on resulting behavior. Research in the career literature has begun to emphasize connections between one’s thoughts and emotions in regards to career development, including relationships found between negative career thoughts, feelings, and proponents of career decision status (e.g., Kelly & Shin, 2009; Saunders, Peterson, Sampson, & Reardon, 2000). The cognitive-behavioral model includes the domains of dysfunctional thoughts, mood, and behavior which will be measured by the presence of career-related thinking, emotional distress, and career decision status respectively. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine difficulties in choosing a major or career within the context of a cognitive-behavioral model in a sample of 200 undergraduate students. Through the use of structural equation modeling, it was found that the presence of negative career thoughts were highly instrumental in predicting difficulties in identifying a career choice. While emotional components were highly correlated with both thoughts and career decision status, no direct relationship existed between affect and outcome. Therefore, it is suggested that interventions addressing career-related thinking may be beneficial in reducing difficulties in making a career choice, while focusing on emotional components may be helpful as well. Further, results of this study indicated that no differences existed between these relationships among diverse demographic groups based on gender, race, or college class standing. Implications for important future research and study limitations also are discussed

Understanding Female Engineering Enrollment: Explaining Choice with Critical Engineering Agency

One path to increasing the diversity of the engineering workforce is to understand the affective self-beliefs of women who choose engineering and how those beliefs change over time. By understanding these self-beliefs, educators can help to empower women to identify with engineering and see its potential to make change in their world. Rigorous research in this area is needed and could have significant positive impact on the engineering workforce. This research builds on critical agency theory by validating and refining the frame-work of Critical Engineering Agency (CEA), though which students’ interest in engineering is enhanced when they see opportunities to make change in their world. This framework has been developed by drawing from prior qualitative research and through a quantitative national study. Structural equation modeling was used to understand the connections be-tween the constructs of CEA. Additional work was conducted to understand other factors that influence students’ choice of engineering. A pair of qualitative follow-up studies to this work were conducted to understand the reasons why students develop CEA and choose engineering as a career. The qualitative phase added explanatory context and interpretive power to previously identified relationships through open-ended surveys and a longitudinal case study. The results highlight the salience of the CEA framework, indicating that recog-nition beliefs are the most important piece of identity development and holding agency beliefs about the positive impact that engineering and science can have on the world is more important for women than men in affecting their engineering choice. Qualitative results illustrated how identity and agency beliefs form and how the connection between Communities of Practice and identity through agential bridging occurs. The results from an in-depth case study demonstrated how CEA is developed through constructed hybrid spaces and practically plays a role in engineering decisions and identity formation within an engineering Community of Practice. Students’ identities and agency beliefs provide insight into why students choose and persist in areas related to engineering, how professors might develop students’ internalization of recognition in the classroom, and how this CEA framework might provide a lens for future research. Providing high school and college faculty, admissions and recruitment staff, and college administrators with research-based strategies to increase female students’ personal engagement with engineering is an important step towards diversifying engineering

How to Do QuantCrit: A Reflexive Account of Applying Critical Quantitative Methods to a Study of Black Women in STEM

There has been extensive research into the underrepresentation of minoritized students in STEM disciplines since the 1990s with limited success in improving the representation of Black women in math-intensive STEM fields. This dissertation aims to address how the guiding tenets of critical quantitative (QuantCrit) methods work when used with publicly available datasets and commonly used statistical approaches. Additionally, this dissertation provides a framework for how to apply reflexivity as a method while utilizing a QuantCrit approach. The publicly available HSLS:09 dataset is used as part of a reflexive study to demonstrate how the tenets of Critical Race Theory (CRT) map onto a QuantCrit study utilizing structural equation modeling. Through personal, methodological, and conceptual reflexivity, disconnects between the tenets and the QuantCrit study are highlighted and discussed. These findings indicate a need for more robust guidelines surrounding QuantCrit research. Furthermore, publication access must be expanded to encourage movement beyond traditional White ways of knowing. Advisor: Elvira Abric

Secondary School Variables in Predicting Technology, Engineering, Mathematics (TEM) Major Choice

This paper addresses the growing body of research into factors that can influence the decision for high school students to enter into a Technology, Engineering, Mathematics (TEM) major in college. A total n of 691, including 372 TEM majors (143 females and 229 males) were selected from the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS, 2002) using propensity matching. A Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) methodology was utilized in the Social Cognitive Career Theory framework and showed good model fit in the whole group, female only and male only groups. Though intent to major was a strong predictor, observed gender differences were observed related to latent and endogenous variables

Improving IS Enrollment Choices: The Role of Social Support

Over the last decade, enrollment in Information Systems (IS) and related programs has dropped worldwide and still remains low despite positive job market predictions. Given the significant negative consequences of low enrollments on both academia and industry, the IS community has focused its efforts on mechanisms to increase enrollments. This study investigates how such a mechanism – social support – influences students’ aspirations to pursue an IS degree. More specifically, the study suggests that social support, self-efficacy, outcome expectations, and interests independently and cumulatively affect students’ choice of IS as their major

The Role of Career Optimism and Perceived Barriers in College Students’ Academic Persistence: A Social Cognitive Career Theory Approach

Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT) suggests that one’s self-efficacy beliefs, one’s outcome expectations, and salient contextual influences impact the development of interests, goals, and goal-oriented behaviors. Additionally, initial support has been found in the SCCT literature to indicate that outcome expectations may mediate the relationship between self-efficacy and goals while contextual influences may moderate the relationship between self-efficacy and goals. By examining conditional indirect effects between academic self-efficacy, career optimism (an outcome expectation), perceived carrier barriers (a contextual influence), and intention to persist toward graduation (a goal) in a college student sample, this project aimed to further understand how these relationships operate. Furthermore, previous research utilizing SCCT has not examined career optimism as an outcome expectation. Data was collected from 349 undergraduates. Contrary to expectations, the proposed conditional indirect effects model was not supported. While academic self-efficacy significantly predicted persistence intentions, career optimism and perceived career barriers did not also predict persistence intentions. Results suggest that academic self-efficacy and proximal processes related to degree persistence were more salient than distal processes related to degree persistence for students in this sample

Anticipated Life Role Salience and Career Decision-Making Difficulties

With the dual-earner population increasingly becoming the norm, undergraduate students are forced to consider the ways in which their career choice may affect their future family life, as well as how their family life may affect their career. Research has shown that undergraduate students may alter their vocational aspirations or adjust their future family plans to avoid work-family role conflict thus implying that students are making career decisions based on their prioritization of anticipated future life roles. The present study sought to investigate how the salience of different life roles may factor into the level of career decision-making difficulty (CDMD) experienced by undergraduate students. A sample of undergraduate students (N=300) participated in an online survey reporting information about their anticipated life role salience and current career decision-making difficulty. Multicultural variables such as race, religiousness/ spirituality, and gender were also assessed. Using a measurement model the following results were determined: I) Participants with high parental role salience reported less career decision-making difficulty than participants with low parental role salience; 2) Participants with high marital role salience reported more career decision-making difficulty than participants with low marital role salience; 3) White participants reported higher family role salience than Non-White participants; 4) Participants who identified themselves as religious and/or spiritual reported higher family role salience than participants who did not consider themselves to be religious/ spiritual; 5) Women reported higher family role salience than men. Implications of these findings as well as suggestions for interventions are discussed