A Research On Students’ Vocational Interests And Values In Senior High Schools

This thesis develops The Questionnaire of High School Students’ Vocational Interests which includes 34 items and 7 factors. Tested, the questionnaire possesses high reliability and validity.The study is conducted with the self-compiled questionnaire and The Questionnaire of Vocational Values edited by Zhang Yongzhong. 968 students from No. 1 Senior High School and No. 16 Senior High School in Changzhi City were selected as testes. The following are the research results:1. The types of high school students’ vocational interests for the order form high to low are social pattern, artistic type, traditional pattern, technology-based, research-based, outdoor type, and management.2. There exist some differences of students’ vocational interests among school types, grades, genders, and “one family one child” or not. Students in the key senior high school tend to take more interests in artistic vocation; science students shows more interests in technology- based and research-based jobs, so do boys; arts students take more interests in artistic occupation and girls are inclined to show interests in artistic type, social pattern, conventional type and natural pattern jobs. Only child shows more interests in research-based jobs than not only children. The students in the Grade three show less research- based occupation than other grades, and with students growing, they gradually take interests in management vocation. At the same time, there is no salient correlation between parents’ educational level and vocational interest types, while there exists negative correlation between family monthly income and technology-based and research-based occupations.3. The factors of senior high school students’ vocational value in orders form high to low are the followings: prestige status, development and health care factors.4. There are certain differences among students’ vocational value on prestige status dimension, and development factors, and no difference on health care. Students in key high schools, art students, high school students in cities attach more importance to prestige status compared with students in ordinary high schools, science students, and students in suburb high schools. With the higher grades, the prestige status factor gains more focus and girls think more of development factor than boys. Besides, there exists salient negative correlation between parents’ educational level and the prestige status factor.5. Development factors can predict seven kinds of vocational interests, prestige status factor can predict management and conventional interests, and health care can predict artistic interests. However, the prediction from prestige status and health care factor is much limited.