Development of a measure of home-career conflict related to career motivation in college women

The purpose of this paper is to describe the development of a measure of Home-Career conflict (H-C) for college women. Data from two studies are presented. Subjects for the first study were college women enrolled in undergraduate psychology classes (N=163) at a large midwestern college. Subjects for the second study were fifty student teachers enrolled in Traditional female college majors (i.e., a majority are women) and fifty engineering students in Nontraditional female college majors (i.e., a majority are men). Findings from the first study indicated that high negative affect scores on the H-C measure were significantly (p<.05) related to low career motivation scores. Findings from the first study were used to revise the measure. Using discriminant analysis results from the second study obtained significantly different (p<.02) patterns of scores for Traditional college majors compared to Nontraditional college majors. Traditional majors wrote more stories depicting mothers as primarily homemakers and described more negative affect in their stories. Reliability estimates and validity data are provided. Suggestions for refinement of the measure are discussed as well as possible counseling uses.