The role of career barriers in high school students' career choice behavior in Taiwan.(Global Visions)

Career counseling for high school students in Taiwan, Republic of China, is important because all the students need to declare their college majors when they apply for colleges and/or take the College Entrance Examination to get into colleges. (The College Entrance Examination is similar to the Scholastic Aptitude Test in the United States. It tests students' understanding in high school learning, including math, Chinese literature, English, natural science, and social science.) To understand factors related to their career choice behavior, empirical studies are needed to aid guidance counselors to effectively intervene to enhance students' educational status. Of the varieties of career models applied in Western culture, we believe the social cognitive career theory (SCCT) developed by Lent, Brown, and Hackett (1994) is the most appropriate one for career counseling practitioners to understand factors related to student career choice behavior.

The SCCT was developed to explain the interplay among person and contextual variables within three important phases of the career development process: the formation of academic and vocational interest, selection and pursuit of career-related choices, and performance and persistence in educational and occupational endeavors. The purpose of the current study was to test the second segment of the models, that is, the choice model. Variables related to choice behavior include person variables such as self-efficacy, outcome expectation, and interest. Contextual variables, on the other hand, are mainly perceived barriers and supports. In our study, we examined the role of contextual barriers in the choice model because recent studies have shown that social-contextual factors might facilitate or impede career development in addition to the person variables such as self-efficacy and outcome expectations (Lent et al., 2001; Richie et al., 1997).

In the past decade, the structure of the SCCT model has been tested in a variety of samples. More and more research has examined hypotheses involving social contextual variables in addition to the social cognitive variables. Lent et al. (2001) tested the model by using a sample composed of 111 college students. Findings indicated that self-efficacy and outcome expectations were jointly predictive of interests and choice intentions. Support and barrier percepts produced only weak direct relations to choice, although barrier percepts were found to moderate interest--choice relations. Lent et al. (2001) found that a model portraying barriers and supports as indirectly (via their impact on self-efficacy) linked to choice produced a better fit to the data than did a model specifying barriers and supports as directly linked to choice. In another study, Lent, Brown, Nota, and Soresi (2003) tested the predictions of the SCCT model. Findings based on 328 students in an introductory engineering course indicated good support for a model portraying contextual supports and barriers as indirectly linked to choice goals and actions through self-efficacy rather than directly as posited by SCCT.

Lent et al. (2005) further examined the utility of SCCT in predicting engineering interests and major choice goals among women and men and among students at historically Black and predominantly White universities. Findings based on a sample of 487 students in introductory engineering courses at three universities indicated that the SCCT-based model of interest and choice goals produced a good fit to the data across gender and university type. The roles of environmental supports and barriers in the choice of science and engineering fields were important. The current study examined the role of career barriers on choice behavior across the six Holland (1997) types (i.e., RIASEC: Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, and Conventional).

To test the model in other cultural settings, Lent et al. (2003) used a sample composed of 796 Italian high school students. The results indicated that self-efficacy and outcome expectations jointly predict interests. Also, interests mediate the relations of self-efficacy and outcome expectations to choice consideration. However, the specific nature of the mediation effect (i.e., full vs. partial) varied somewhat across the Holland (1997) RIASEC types. In addition, contrary to SCCT's predictions, social supports and barriers related to choice consideration mostly indirectly (through self-efficacy) rather than directly. Mani (2005) examined the supports and barriers that Sikh Indo-Canadian young women perceive in their career decision-making process to enter the applied social sciences at the university level. The results indicated that self-efficacy appraisals played an important role in moderating the participants' views of supports and barriers in their career decision-making processes.

To further understand the role of contextual and cognitive variables in career choice behavior, Flores and O'Brien (2002) tested the SCCT model with 364 Mexican American adolescent women. The results indicated that feminist attitudes and parental support predicted career aspiration. However, none of the background contextual variables in their study predicted nontraditional career self-efficacy. Caldera, Robitschek, Frame, and Pannell (2003) assessed intrapersonal, familial, and cultural factors in the process of committing to a career choice of Mexican American and non-Hispanic White college women. The results indicated that Mexican American women's commitment to a career choice was influenced more by their instrumentality and less by their expressiveness or their parents.

These findings underscore the need to investigate intrapersonal, contextual factors and culture in women's processes of committing to a career choice. The SCCT model, emphasizing the increasing importance of social-contextual variability, should be further examined in different cultures. Fouad and Byars-Winston (2005) conducted a meta-analysis to investigate the relationship between culture and vocational choice variables. They concluded that there are differences among racial/ethnic groups in perceptions of career-related opportunities and barriers. Our study tested the role of career barriers in the SCCT model in Chinese culture in Taiwan.

For high school students, there are several studies based on the SCCT that examine the relationships between contextual support/barriers and vocational/educational self-efficacy and outcome expectations. Ali, McWhirter, and Chronister (2005) conducted research using a sample of 114 ninth graders from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and found that sibling and peer support accounted for a significant amount of variance in vocational/educational self-efficacy beliefs. Ali et al. also found that vocational/educational self-efficacy beliefs significantly predicted vocational outcome expectations. However, contextual supports and barriers did not account for any unique variance associated with vocational outcome expectations. Wettersten et al. (2005) investigated the ability of assessed levels of social support, perceived parental involvement, academic self-efficacy, and perceived educational barriers to predict school engagement and work role attitudes among rural high school students. Results supported the hypothesized importance of contextual factors (social support and parent involvement) and self-efficacy in predicting the work and school attitudes of rural students. Creed, Prideaux, and Patton (2005) conducted a longitudinal study to test students in Grade 8 and again in Grade 10, and the results indicated that female students were more likely to be continuously undecided. In our study, we also examined the gender difference of the variables related to career behaviors.

In terms of cultural differences, Chinese culture was thought to be more collectivistic when compared with Western culture. For high school students, the role of family members' opinions must play an important role in students' decisions to declare their college majors. Therefore, in the current study, we also examined the content of career barriers perceived by high school boys and girls in the process of career decision making. We hope that the present study will aid high school guidance counselors in their work with students.

Purpose of the Present Study

We agreed on the assumptions proposed by SCCT that contextual supports and barriers play key roles in career choice process. However, little research has examined hypotheses involving these variables, especially in non-Western cultures. We also note the idea proposed by Brown and Lent (1999) that the role of career barriers is less clearly articulated in SCCT. Therefore, in the current study, we examined the role of career barriers in high school students' career choice behavior in a Chinese culture. More specifically, the purpose of the study was to examine the role of 12 categories of career barriers in an individual's career choice behavior. We hypothesized that career barriers can predict high school students' career choice behavior after controlling for the effect of self-efficacy. We sought to extend earlier findings on the test of the SCCT model in Taiwan and have attempted to examine the role of career barriers in high school student career choice behavior.

Method

Participants

Participants were 584 high school students (243 girls, 341 boys) from seven counties in Taiwan. They were primarily Grade 10 (65.8%) and Grade 11 (34.2%) students, with a mean age of 15.92 years (SD = .74). The sample was good in terms of its representativeness of high school students in the Taiwan area. The students were recruited by the school guidance counselors who received an invitation from our study to help with the inventory administration. The percentages for the college majors, as related to the six Holland types, that they preferred most and would like to apply for in the near future were 20.9% (R), 34.4% (I), 20.2% (A), 4.0% (S), 9.8% (E), and 8.9% (C). Of the participants, 1.8% did not express which major they preferred to declare in their future college education. Referring to the same six Holland types, the percentages of the ideal job categories they liked most and would like to apply for in the future were 16.4% (R), 28.1% (I), 12.2% (A), 22.4% (S), 13.3% (E), and 5.5% (C). Approximately 2.1% of the students did not express which job category they liked most and would like to apply for in the future.

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