The Revision Of Career Decision-making Difficulties Questionnaire And A Study On The Characteristics Of College Students

Career decision-making difficulty is defined as the difficulties that one may encounter during the process of career decision-making.These difficulties can be classified into three dimensions:lack of preparation,the difficulties in formation exploration and contradictions or conflict.This not only includes the rational and cognitive factors but also emotional and affective factors.College students are in a period of career exploration and their difficulties characteristics in career decision-making are different from the employed who in the transition period for vocational career choice again.On the one hand,the market economy has already established a dominant position in China,college expansion is continuing,and higher education graduate employment system has transitioned from the distribution to self-choice,two-way choice basically,the employment of the individual choice is growing importance.On the other hand,college students are in the initial stage that they have to make career choices and career-oriented,which is a crucial period of individual career development.Therefore,the study of career decision-making difficult among college students not only provided theoretical basis for the policy-making of recruitment and employment of China's colleges,but also provided scientific basis for understanding the main features of the college students who encounter difficulties in career decision-making and developing pertinence career guidance.In this study,it is basis that the college students' career decision-making difficulties questionnaire which was compiled by Li Xiying(2006),using the research results of home and abroad for reference,combining with existed questionnaires and the results of open test,perfecting the theoretical model of college students' career decision-making difficulties.According to the theoretical model and the results of twice structured questionnaire survey,the study revised the college students' career decision-making difficulties questionnaire and formatted the formal scale by Exploratory and Confirmatory Factor Analysis,By using the formal tool to test 2056 college students, the research preliminarily revealed the characteristics of college students in China during their career decision-making period and offered some suggestions and countermeasures.The conclusions are as the following:1.The career decision-making difficulty is a multi-component structure and the model is a third-order one-factor,second-order three-factor and first-order ten-factor.It mainly includes three dimensions-lack of readiness,the difficulties of information exploration and the conflicts.Lack of readiness consists of three factors:the lack of career planning,irrational beliefs and indecisiveness.The difficulties of information exploration consist of the four factors:the lack of information about self,the lack of information about occupations,the lack of information about the social environment and the lack of ways about information obtaining.The conflicts consist of the three factors:the external conflicts,the internal conflicts and discomfort emotion.2.In this study,the revision career decision-making difficulties questionnaire of college students contains three subscales,10 factors,35 items,and has good reliability and validity.Among them,the homogeneity reliability is 0.915,the split-half reliability is 0.914.The correlation coefficient between every factor and total questionnaire is 0.634～0.767,and the correlation coefficient between each divided measuring table and total questionnaire is upon 0.844.The construct validity of the questionnaire is also good.By using the career decision-making self-efficacy questionnaire as a criterion questionnaire,we fred that it shows significant negative correlation between the ten factors of the college students' career decision-making difficulties and the five factors of the career decision-making self-efficacy questionnaire(r=-0.100^**～-0.375^**).All show that the criterion validity is good.3.Difficulties in career decision-making of college students in China are in a middle level as a whole.At present,the main difficulties are the discomfort emotion,the lack of information about the social environment in the process of decision-making and the indecisiveness before decision-making,all of which are in the mid to upper level.In addition,the level of difficulties in preparation of career planning as well as how to obtain information show relatively higher difficulty level than others.4.At present,the relationship between the level of college students career decision-making difficulties in China and grades shows inverted "V'-type relationship. The sophomore students have the most difficulties in career decision-making process. After the second year,the difficulties show the linear downward trend.5.The career decision-making difficulties of college students show major differences in six respects:gender,major,part-time job experience,school type,family sources and whether parents join in decision-making or not.(1) There are significant gender differences in career decision-making difficulties of college students.This study finds in indecision,career information,social environment information,information acquisition,and discomfort emotion and so on, that comparing with boys,girls show more difficulties in career decision-making.In irrational beliefs and the external conflicts,boys show more difficulties.(2) Career decision-making difficulties of college students also keep professional differences.Overall,the arts students show few difficulties,mainly in the following aspects:in the preparation aspect(lack of career planning and irrational beliefs), information exploration,and external conflicts.The level of difficulty is far less than the engineering category students.(3) In career decision-making difficulties Of college students whether or not joining in part-time job,there are significant differences.The study finds that in the three sub-scales(lack of preparedness,information exploration,and conflicts) The students having part-time job experience shows fewer difficulties comparing with the students having no part-time job experience,especially in career planning,to explore career information exploration,information acquisition exploration and discomfort emotion, there are very significant differences(P＜0.01).(4) Career decision-making difficulties of college students in the school types also show significant differences.The study finds that in the information exploration sub-scale and to explore career information,to explore the social environment,conflicts subscale and discomfort emotion,the key university students get significantly lower difficulties score than the vocational school students.Besides,in the factor of discomfort emotion,the general university students show significantly lower difficulty level than vocational school students.(5) Career decision-making difficulties of college students on the family sources also show significant differences.The study finds that differences showed very significantly in exploring information(P＜0.01).The level of difficulty of students who come from large cities is significantly lower than those who come from rural areas and towns.The degree of difficulties is no significant difference among those who from small and medium-sized cities and those who are from provincial capitals and major cities.(6) Career decision-making difficulties of college students in the participation of parents have significant differences.The study finds that,apart from the irrational beliefs,the rest of the factors and sub-scales show that students who are with parental involvement in decision-making have significantly lower difficulties than those who are without parental involvement,especially in the career planning,self-information exploration,occupational information exploration,the social environment information exploration and internal conflict,the difficulties are exceptionally significant differences(P＜0.01).The main contributions of this study are as followings:the college students' career decision-making difficulties scale is revised and perfected;a formal measure tool is developed preliminarily;the characteristics of college students' career decision-making difficulties are revealed;the study provides some scientific basis for career education and mental health education.