The predictive validity of the Career Decision Scale in longitudinal patterns of adolescent career indecision
Abstract
This study explored the predictive validity of the Career Decision Scale (CDS) (Osipow, Carney, Winer, Uanico, & Koschir, 1976) in identifying longitudinal patterns of career indecision in an adolescent population. The CDS was administered to 205 high school seniors in 1979 (Hartman & Hartman, 1982). Subjects were contacted each year over a 10-year period (1979 to 1989) with regard to the status of a career goal specified when they were high school seniors. Two levels of career indecision, chronic and developmental, were defined operationally by number of changes in career goals during the 10 years following the completion of the CDS. The rationale for testing this hypothesis was the contention of Hartman and Fuqua (1983) that chronically undecided individuals differ from developmentally undecided individuals in that they manifest psychological and behavioral dysfunctions which render traditional career counseling approaches relatively ineffective. Analysis of three different factor structures of the CDS (Hartman & Hartman, 1982; Shimizu, Vondracek, Schulenberg, & Hostetler, 1988) and one derived for this study were conducted to determine whether any of these factor structures significantly improved beyond chance the classification of individuals into decided, developmentally undecided, and chronically undecided, and to determine which factor structure best separated groups. Additional analyses interpreted the dimensions along which the groups were separated. The results of the study supported the research hypothesis, in that discriminant analyses comparing undecided, developmentally undecided, and chronically undecided groups based on factor scores derived from both the Hartman and McAllister factor solutions yielded significant discriminant functions. Based on the factor solution provided by Hartman and Hartman (1982), a significant discriminant function was obtained such that individuals with high scores on the function had high scores on the factors representing lack of structure and external barriers to career choice. The discriminant analysis based on McAllister's four-factor solution yielded a significant discriminant function such that individuals with high scores on the function tended to have high scores on the factors representing confusion and approach-approach conflict, as well as low scores on the factor representing knowledge of interests and abilities.
Subject Area
Psychology|Academic guidance counseling
Recommended Citation
McAllister, Suzanne Helen, "The predictive validity of the Career Decision Scale in longitudinal patterns of adolescent career indecision" (1992). ETD Collection for Fordham University. AAI9304522.
https://research.library.fordham.edu/dissertations/AAI9304522
