| The present exploratory study examined the applicability of personality constructs derived from the theory of Transactional Analysis (TA) to the understanding of women's career preferences and vocational identity. More specifically, it investigated the differences among groups of occupationally traditional and nontraditional women with high or low levels of vocational identity and their scores on seven TA personality characteristics. The study further explored whether a constellation of the TA variables formed a discriminating dimension that distinguished between the four occupational groups.; A nonrandom sample of 124 undergraduate college women was employed in the study. An equal number of subjects were recruited from classes in the Colleges of Education and Engineering to represent women's traditional and nontraditional career choice respectively. Volunteers completed the Vocational Identity Scale of the My Vocational Situation (Holland, Daiger, & Power, 1980), Adjective Check List: TA Scales (Gough & Heilburn, 1983), TA Life Position Survey (Kramer & Strade, 1976), and a demographic data form.; Multivariate and univariate analyses of variance procedures were employed to examine group differences on measures of the TA personality characteristics. The MANOVA procedure yielded a significant (p {dollar}<{dollar}.01) overall multivariate main effect due to group differences of vocational identity on a weighted linear combination of the TA variables. Subsequent univariate ANOVA procedures on each of the TA variables clarified the significance of the MANOVA result. Findings of the ANOVA procedure revealed significant (p {dollar}<{dollar}.01) differences in group means on three of the seven TA variables. Significant main effects were obtained in this analysis on the Adult ego state, Adapted Child ego state, and I'm OK life position variables.; Further analysis was conducted with the discriminant function technique. It was found that the I'm OK life position and Adapted Child ego state variables made the greatest contribution to the discriminating dimension. Results indicated that the discriminant function formed by these two TA personality characteristics had moderate to high utility as a mechanism to correctly classify subjects in their respective occupational group. |
