Research On The Influence Of College Students' Identity Style On Career Decision-making Process

Students in university is in the preparation stage to achieve personal goals,develop appropriate career planning and make a career choice.According to Erikson's identity theory,the most important task of college students is to establish self-identity which is an idea or concept about "Who I am" and how to define oneself.It gets through the past,present and future with consistency and continuity.In recent years,Berzonsky proposed to study identity from the point of social-cognitive strategies.And according to the different ways people construct or maintain a sense of identity,the identity is divided into three kinds,including the information style,the normative style,and the diffuse/avoidant style.This paper attempts to understand how identity style act on career decision-making processes,which has important effect on understanding the psychology and behavioral characteristics.This study used a combination of questionnaires and experimental approach to senior graduates for the study and it includes two parts.The first part randomly investigated 397subjucts in Nanjing with the revised ISI-5,and did item analysis,reliability and validity analysis,factor analysis with the scale.The revised scale has been used to measure 690 subjects to know the difference between different subjects of identity style.Based on information board technology and the career selection task,the second part randomly selected 20 informational style subjects,20 normative style subjects and 20 diffuse/avoidant style subjects,investigated the role of the development of identity style in career decision-making process.The result shows that:(1)The revised ISI-5 contains 21 items in 3 dimensions,and has measurement properties in the university students.In general,the largest number of diffusion/avoid style(35.86%),followed by information-style(34.83%),the smallest of the normative style(29.31%).And there are significant differences in grade and gender distribution.(2)In information board career selection task,the university students with different identity style had significant differences among cue preferences,and compare with the informational and diffuse/avoidant style subjects,and the normative style subjects prefer the cue of important people's advice.(3)In information board career selection task,the university students with different identity style had significant differences among subjective report,and compare with the diffuse/avoidant style subjects,the informational style subjects thought that the task is easier.(4)In different task conditions,the information search index were significantly different on the identity style,and compare with the diffuse/avoidant style subjects,the informational style subjects had more comprehensive and deeper information search.(5)The interaction between identity style and the number of jobs on the information search index in information board career selection task was significant.There are some main conclusions as follows:(1)The revised ISI-5 has good measurement properties,and is suitable for the domestic city college students;(2)The normative style subjects prefer the cue of important people's advice.(3)The maturity of identity style influenced the subjects' information search index and the difficulty perceived of task.(4)In the career selection task,the subjects' differences on the information search index were increased along with the increase of the task's complexity.