High School Students' Career‐Related Decision‐Making Difficulties

The present study examined the construct of career‐related decision‐making difficulties among 1,843 Israeli adolescents: choosing a high school (9th grade), choosing high school elective courses (10th grade), and deciding on a military job preference (11th grade). Three versions of the Career Decision‐Making Difficulties Questionnaire (CDDQ) were constructed to match the 3 decision situations. The structures of the 10 difficulty categories of the revised CDDQ were found similar to that proposed by I. Gati, M. Krausz, and S. H. Osipow (1996). Boys reported higher difficulties than girls in external conflicts and dysfunctional beliefs. Research and counseling implications are discussed.     

Perceived benefits of using an Internet-based interactive career planning system

Making Better Career Decisions (MBCD) is an Internet-based interactive career planning system designed to help deliberating individuals. The present research examined the benefits of a dialogue with MBCD, by analyzing 712 users’ perceptions of its contribution to their career decision-making process, and locating variables associated with these perceptions. A pre-dialogue and a post-dialogue questionnaire were used to collect the users’ perceptions of its benefits and measure the change in the degree of decidedness. Perceived benefit was derived from participants’ ratings of the degree of progress they had made in their career decision-making process, whether they had learned about additional factors to be considered and their career-related preferences, as well as their ratings of the quality of the list of “promising” career alternatives presented to them during their dialogue with MBCD. This composite perceived benefit was found to be positively associated with the users’ decidedness at the completion of the dialogue with MBCD. Users’ satisfaction with the length and variety of their personal “promising alternatives” list was associated with a higher perceived benefit.