College Students' Career Decision Making Self-efficacy And Its Relationship With Coping Style

Nowdays, intensive competitions in job-hunting have become one of the main causes of graduates'pressures. In colleges and universities, a widespread consensus is that career education should be the job which runs through the four-year university-wide program of education. From the day when the college students come into the school, the schools provide professional education, personal quality education, capacity-building and so on. The purpose of all the education is to ensure students'successful choice of career and to achieve the best post match and the best utilization of individual capability.Career decision making self-efficacy (CDMSE) refers to the belief of ability that individuals implement and adhere to one's own occupational-choice behavior. It plays an important role in the occupational-choice behavior. The degree of one's CDMSE can affect the individual's occupational choice directly or indirectly. The studies found that CDMSE is affected by many factors including demographic factors such as gender, age, as well as the experience and knowledge skills that the individual possesses, and how to make use of them. Coping style refers to the strategy and methods about the cognitive and behavioral adjustment the individuals adopt when they face different sources of stress. That is how the individual makes use of existing knowledge and experience to resolve the source of stress. A large number of studies about self-efficacy and coping style found that self-efficacy is positively related to active coping style, negatively related to passive coping style. However, very little research attended to the relationship between CDMSE and coping style.Literature survey and interview survey are adopted in the study. Based on literature review of a large number of domestic and overseas current research, the study investigated 494 college students who study in Shandong Normal University and Shandong Economic University by using the Career Decision-Making Self-Efficacy Scale-Simple Form (CDMSE-SF) and Simple Coping Style Questionnaire (SCSQ). The study examined the general characteristics of university students'CDMSE and the relationship between CDMSE and coping style. The conclusions are as follows:(1) In the five dimensions of CDMSE, self-evaluation dimension had the highest scores, and making-plan dimension received the lowest scores. The order of five dimensions'scores is self-evaluation, screening-goal, problem-solving, collecting-information and making-plan.(2) There are significant gender differences on total scores of CDMSE and its five dimensions. Boys'are higher than girls'. In general, there is not significant grade difference on college students'CDMSE. Significant differences exist on whether or not to participate in social practice, and the CDMSE scores of students who participated in social practice are higher than the students who did not.(3) In general, college students'coping style has no gender differences, grade differences, or the differences about whether or not to participate in social practice.(4)Coping style is significantly correlated with CDMSE total scores and its five dimensions. Positive coping style is positively related to the five dimensions of CDMSE; negative coping style is negatively correlated to the five dimensions of CDMSE. In other words, the college students who take more positive coping style and less negative coping style to deal with problems have higher CDMSE; the college students who take less positive coping style and more negative coping style to deal with problems have lower CDMSE.(5) CDMSE and its five dimensions can be positively predicted by positive coping style and negatively predicted by negative coping style.