Research On Integrated Model Of Career Decision-Making

Career decision-making is an important task for us; because it's result has a direct influence on personal career development. There are different types of career decision-making in real life. Someone can make a career decision quickly, and others may have difficulties in making career decision. Therefore, for both individuals and researchers, it will be great theoretical and practical meaning to explore the rules and internal psychological mechanism of career decision-making.On the content, while bring the implicit cognition and emotion into the information processing process of career decision making, we explore their influence on career decision-making process; as to the ways and means, with the combination of experiment and investigation, we build up the integrated model of career decision making.Chapter 1 is the review of the research on career decision-making. According to the review, we conclude that career decision-making is not an instant behavior of vocational choice, but a process of decision-making. Since the beginning of 20th century, there have been two approaches in this field. One of them is trait factor theory of career decision making, which emphasizes the matching the features of people and environment; the other approach influenced by the research in economic decision-making field has proposed normative, prescriptive and descriptive career decision-making model. We also analyse the value and problems of these theories in this chapter.In Chapter 2, the limitations and trends in research on career decision-making are discussed. The two trends of career decision making research are from concerning the relative factors to investigating the process and strategies of career decision-making, from emphasizing rigid matching people and environment or absolute rational utility and evaluation to probability to flexible, multi-phase and bounded rational process of career decision-making. The limitations are as follows: research on the implicit cognition of the career decision-making is sparse, researchers only pay little attentionon the function of emotion in career decision-making, there is no integrated model including cognitive, emotional and environmental component proposed.Chapter 3 is about the frame and hypothesis of the whole research. In this research an integrated model of career decision making process will be build up, a notion is proposed that the micro process of information processing interact with the macro environmental factors in career decision-making and the career decision making is a dynamic decision-making process.In chapter 4, empirical studies are conducted. Information board technique of process tracing research is applied in five experiments, which explore the phases of career decision-making process, and the impact of implicit cognition and emotion on the process of career decision-making. The first one of the two investigations explore the relation among the cognitive process, personal features and social factors, then the integrated model of career decision-making is primarily built up; the second one investigates the ecological validity of the integrated model. Through the empirical studies we can conclude that career decision-making is information processing process including implicit and explicit cognition; persons experience the emotion during the whole process, and the emotional status of persons also influence the manner of information processing in career decision making process; the social and culture factors, family economic status and personal features continuously interact with each other. In a word, the career decision-making is a dynamic multi-phase decision making process.The last chapter is the summary of the research. The academic values of the research are iterated. The result of this research can be applied in career counseling and guidance. At the end of the chapter the limitations of the research are discussed too.