Preliminary Study On The Undergraduates' Perceived Career Barriers And Coping Efficacy: Questionnaire And Actuality

To most undergraduates, they will choose their first occupation before graduate from university. Such experience will have a profoundly impact on the students' future vocational development. During the process, students will always face various barriers coming from the inner or outer environment. How they evaluate these barriers and whether they have enough confidence to cope with them will certainly influence students' career decision. Such problem has been paid attention by the mass media and intrigued researchers for a long time. However, most of the researches before only remained in listing the objective barriers or discuss the problem of employment from the moral point of view. These researches barely concerned about the cognition of the students and their coping efficacy to the barriers.Basis on the review of the literature, we put forth an operation definition of perceived career barriers from the psychological points: the negative events and status emerging during the process of gaining the first occupation and are evaluated by the undergraduates as obstacles to their expected occupational aim. These events or status includes both the inner and the outer problems. The operation definition of coping efficacy is: undergraduates' belief in their capabilities to organize and execute courses of action required to cope with prospective barriers when they pursuing their first job.Based on overviews of former researches and the interview of open-ended, and according to our operation definition, the results of open-ended investigation, we constructed the undergraduates' perceived barriers questionnaire and the coping efficacy questionnaire which were used to investigate 758 college students. With the Exploring Factor Analysis, we constructed the dimensions and formed the questionnaire. The statistical analysis results indicated that the questionnaire was reliable and valid.On the condition of our investigation, we get the following conclusions:1. The undergraduates' perceived barriers questionnaire had six dimensions, i.e. university factors, job market situation, family expectation, major background, career familiarity and individual quality.2. The coping efficacy questionnaire had 5 dimensions, i.e. university factors coping, job market situation coping, family expectation coping, career familiarity coping and individual comprehensive quality coping.3. The undergraduates' perceived barriers questionnaire had significant reliability and validity, and could be used of a tool of survey.4. The undergraduates' coping efficacy questionnaire had significant reliability and validity, and could be used of a tool of survey.5. Generally, the undergraduates have indeed perceived various barriers and which will influence their career choice.6. The freshmen perceived the least career barriers but the junior students perceived the most career barriers. The first-year females perceived more career barriers than the males, however, the situation reversed among the senior undergraduates.7. Generally, the undergraduates have enough confidence to cope with career barriers.8. The freshmen have the greatest confidence in coping with career barriers. During the first two years, science students have greater confidence than atrium ones.9. The relation between undergraduates' perceived career barriers and coping efficacy is significant negative correlation.