The importance of career beliefs in the processing of occupational information

This study investigated the relationship among individuals' career beliefs and the processing of occupational information. University students, completed a career belief, an occupational interest, a vocational motivation, a satisfaction measure, and examined occupational information on a computer. For the experimental trials, participants chose one of nine occupations which they were most interested in pursuing for their career. Participants also answered a question regarding the likelihood of pursuing for their career the occupations that they had chosen.; Results indicated that participants who obtained lower scores on the Intrinsic Satisfaction scale of the CBI spent more time searching through occupational information related to the salary dimension of occupations. However, the majority of the results indicated that individuals' career beliefs were not associated with their occupational information processing.; Exploratory analyses revealed that participants who were relatively less employed spent more time viewing the computer information cells than did participants who were relatively more employed. In addition, working less than full-time and holding more strongly to the belief that the right job is impossible to find predicted the total time spent searching occupational information on the computer. Other exploratory analyses found that individuals searched through significantly more information corresponding to high similarity occupations than intermediate or low similarity cells and chose 55% of the time a high similarity occupation to end their searches on the computer.; Limitations of this research included sample homogeneity involving age, race, gender, and university enrollment, assessment of search behavior at one point in time, lack of information depth contained in the computer program, and a lack of sophistication involving the information search variables. Future research which remedies these limitations and expands the occupational information processing domain is needed. Expansion of this research area may be achieved through the use of protocol analysis, assessments of participants' searching behavior at different times, and an examination of participant personality variables.