| Career maturity is the extent to which individual is ready for coping with career development tasks appropriate to his or her age. In China, secondary school students are on the stage of career exploration, which is one of the important stages in one's career development. The study on career maturity of Chinese secondary school students will not only provide theoretic basis for pertinent career guidance, but also meet the urgent need for the development of Chinese vocational psychology.The purpose of the study was to explore the developmental characteristics of career maturity of Chinese secondary school students. Based on the previous research of home and abroad as well as the results of the open-ended and half open-ended questionnaire surveys, the career maturity model applicable to Chinese secondary school students was developed firstly. Through exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis of the data collected from three structured questionnaire surveys, the structure of the Career Maturity Inventory was constructed and the formal inventory was developed. After the examination of reliability and validity of the inventory, it was used as a measure to explore the developmental characteristics of career maturity in a Chinese sample of 1852 secondary school students.The results indicated as following:(1) Career maturity, a structure including many components, could be divided into two dimensions -- career decision-making knowledge and careerdecision-making attitude . The dimension of career decision-making attitude included five factors: activeness, independence, confidence, utilitarian and decisiveness. The dimension of career decision-making knowledge consisted of both knowledge of jobs and knowledge of oneself.(2) The Career Maturity Inventory developed in the study, which was applicable to Chinese secondary school students, was an instrument with good reliability and validity.(3) The main problems existing in career development of Chinese secondary school students were that they participated in the process of career decision passively and that they knew little about the world of work.(4) With the higher grade, the career maturity of Chinese secondary school students developed in a U-shape. The 3rd grade of junior high school was a key period for career development.(5) Significant gender differences were only found on the factors of confidence and knowledge of jobs. As compared to females, males were more confident in their career decision-making knowledge and knew more about jobs.(6) On the whole, there were significant differences among the students from different kinds of school. From top to bottom, the ranking of the level of overall career maturity was: key school students, technical school students and common school students.(7) Significant area differences existed as well. Students from the east showed a higher level of overall career maturity than their peers from the west.(8) The career maturity of the students varied significantly with their parents' educational levels.(9) Significant differences were observed between the rural students and urban students with the latter scoring higher than the former in the overall career maturity.
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