Students May Self, Occupational Prestige Implicit Preferences Influence Career Decision-making Difficult

Individuals may encounter career decision-making difficulties which means a variety of specific issues when they are in an uncertain state of their professional direction in the future. It has a great impact on college students’ self-awareness, mental health and future career development. In the development process of an individual’s whole life, they will gradually get a more and more clear awareness of themselves with the increasing age and the raise of their knowledge level. There will also be all kinds of hope, expectation and even fear for their future, and these ideas has been in continuous development and changes, which we define the dynamic understanding of self-development as possible selves. Besides, when it comes to the individual’s future career plans, different individuals have different attitudes and preferences to different social prestige careers. In this study, we respectively did scenario simulation experiment method and Implicit Association Test to measure college students’ possible selves and implicit occupational prestige preference and collected data of their achievement motivation and career decision-making difficulties degree by means of achievement motivation scale and college students’ career decision-making difficulties scale from736college students from four universities in Nanjing (Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing Audit University, South Canton College of Communication University of China, Nanjing Engineering Institute).Based on the test results, we explored the relationship among College students’ possible selves, implicit occupational prestige preference and career decision-making difficulties and got the major conclusions:There was a significant difference in college students’ hope possible selves and expected possible selves between different genders, females’ level was higher than males in both of them. There were significant differences in college students’ career decision-making difficulties in origin and professional types, especially the career decision-making difficulties of rural college students got higher score than urban college students.The correlation between college students’ hope possible selves and career decision-making difficulties’ total score as well as its three dimensions that were the lack of preparation, information explore difficulty and conflict contradictions was negative and expected possible selves was negatively correlated to the lack of preparation; but fear possible selves was positively correlated to career decision-making difficulties’ total score as well as its three dimensions in a significant level. Both the results of the multivariate analysis of variance and stepwise regression analysis showed that fear possible selves and hope possible self of college students could predict their career decision-making difficulties, which reached a significant level.College students’ implicit occupational prestige preference was negatively correlated to their career decision-making difficulties’ total score and the lack of preparation in a significant level; but there was no significant correlation between information explore difficulty and conflict contradictions. The results of regression analysis showed that although college students’ implicit occupational prestige preference can only prefer to a little of the variance in predicting career decision-making difficulties, but the predictive effect had reached a significant level.In the last research, we established a structural model in which we set possible selves of college students and their implicit occupational prestige preference as exogenous latent variables, their career decision-making difficulties as the endogenous latent variable, whose model fitting result was ideal. We established another structural model in which we set achievement motivation as a mediating variable. The result not only showed the model’ construct reasonable, but also proved the mediation effect of achievement motivation.