Latent Profiles of Career Decision-Making Difficulties Among College Students: Relational and Motivational Correlates

Abstract

Career decision-making difficulties (CDMD) are one of the key barriers during emerging adulthood and the career decision-making experiences of individuals vary widely in terms of both pattern and degree of difficulty. The present study, based on the taxonomy developed by Gati et al. (1996) and the person-centered CDMD approach, sought to find the latent profiles of CDMD and to explore the correlates of these profiles in terms of their relationships, motivational and self-evaluative dimensions among college students. The measures completed by a sample of 400 college students, recruited through cluster random sampling, included career decision-making difficulties (lack of readiness, lack of information and inconsistent information), perceived parenting styles, social support, belongingness, academic motivation, and core self-evaluations. The optimal solution (highest entropy = .914) was a three-profile solution: Low Difficulty (12%), Moderate Broad Difficulty (74%) and Severe Global Difficulty (14%). There were notable differences between profiles in the psychosocial domains. The Low Difficulty profile had higher scores on belongingness, perceived social support, adaptive motivational regulation (intrinsic and identified regulation), and lower scores on maladaptive parenting (particularly authoritarian). The Severe Global Difficulty profile demonstrated elevated career decision-making difficulties, higher authoritarian parenting, and a complex motivational pattern characterized by both higher autonomous motivation and higher amotivation. while the Moderate Broad Difficulty profile had relatively lower social support, lower belongingness, and higher amotivation. Results are congruent with the multidimensional and heterogeneous character of career decision-making problems and suggest that motivational processes and dispositions in regard to self-evaluation relate to different career decision-making problems. The findings highlight the importance of person-centered approaches to identifying at-risk subgroups and provide some indications that intervention factors such as social connectedness, motivational regulation, and family-related contextual factors can be useful in improving career decision-making readiness in emerging adults.