| One of the most influential tasks of young adulthood is to achieve a sense of vocational calling, yet empirical research on how college students conceptualize calling is sparse. Quantitative models identifying factors that contribute to students' sense of calling is even rarer. This correlational study extends the research literature significantly by empirically examining variables that affect sense of vocational calling in 270 college students as they near graduation. Relationships among demographic variables (gender, race, resident status, GPA, and hours worked), personal characteristics (hope, career-decision self-efficacy, strengths self-efficacy, and spirituality), and student involvement variables (campus involvement, service activities, engaged learning, and psychological sense of community) were explored to assess how these variables directly and indirectly contributed to students' sense of vocational calling. Dobrow's (2006) theory of integrated calling provided the operational definition of calling, with its multidisciplinary approach to measure young adults' perceptions. Structural equation modeling (SEM) (Arbuckle, 2008) was utilized to model students' sense of vocational calling, allowing a determination of how well Dobrow's (2006) calling theory fit the data collected from these students. SEM also provided an estimate of how well each of the designated variables predicted a sense of vocational calling. Separate models were generated, indicating that men and women conceptualized calling in distinctive ways. Although both genders perceived vocational calling from spiritual and purposeful perspectives, men interpreted calling pragmatically and cognitively, while women discerned calling from an affective perspective connected to their sense of self-esteem. There were also gender differences in predictors of vocational calling. The structural path for men was through career decision self-efficacy (beta = .54; p < .001) and involvement in service activities (beta = .29; p < .05), accounting for 41% of the variance in vocational calling. For women, the path was through hope (beta = 47; p < .001) and engaged learning (beta = .34; p < .001), and accounted for 45% of the variance in vocational calling. Implications of these findings for higher education are addressed with regard to understanding gender-related patterns of meaning making that ultimately influence college students' sense of vocational calling. |
