Choosing a major in higher education: Profiles of students’ decision-making process

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Abstract

This study identified decision-making profiles of students who make a choice of a major in higher education. These profiles were examined in a sample of Belgian students at the end of Grade 12, when the educational system expects that these adolescents choose a specific major. Using latent class cluster analysis on adolescents’ scores for coping with career decisional tasks (i.e., orientation, exploration, decisional status, and commitment), four clusters were identified. As expected, these profiles paralleled Marcia’s (1966) identity statuses (i.e., the achievement, moratorium, foreclosure, and diffusion status). Results provided support for the external validity of the identified clusters through differential associations with several person variables (i.e., career decision-making self-efficacy, career choice anxiety, and decision-making style) and with academic functioning in higher education (i.e., commitment, academic and social adjustment). Implications for current educational research and research on career decision-making are discussed.

Highlights

► We identify four educational decision-making profiles of choosing a major. ► The profiles parallel Marcia’s identity statuses. ► Profiles differ on decision-making self-efficacy, choice anxiety, and decision-making style. ► Profiles predict academic functioning in higher education.

Introduction

Each year many adolescents are confronted with the issue of choosing a major in higher education. This educational decision usually implies a complex decision-making process during which adolescents are faced with decisional tasks or activities such as exploring different alternatives, reflecting on interests and skills, comparing suitable alternatives, and choosing one option. Most school counselors would agree that adolescents who are confronted with making the choice of a major may differ in the way they deal with these decisional tasks. For example, some students may be highly committed to their choice without having explored several alternatives, whereas others may show high levels of exploration but are still uncertain about their choice. Thus, different groups of adolescents may exist that are characterized by different combinations of involvement in these decisional tasks (Van Esbroeck, Tibos, & Zaman, 2005), each reflecting a different way of approaching this educational decision. However, little research has addressed the question of whether different decision-making profiles empirically exist among adolescents. The main purpose of the present study was to identify decision-making profiles of adolescents when choosing a specific major in higher education.

Educational choices such as choosing a major can be considered as important career-related decisions. Because adolescents’ ideas about possible future careers develop while making such educational decisions, these choices can be seen as a means for implementing occupational choices (Lent, Brown, & Hackett, 1994) and as an integral part of career development (Super, 1980). More specifically, within Super’s theory of career development (Super, 1980) educational choices can been seen as a mini-cycle (i.e., a decision-making process) within the maxi-cycle of career development: at the end of such a mini-cycle an individual has selected a preferred plan of action (e.g., entering a major in higher education) which in turn influences his or her career. By investigating adolescents’ decision-making profiles with regard to choosing a major in higher education, the current study aims to shed more light on the ways adolescents address one such mini-cycle.

From a theoretical viewpoint, investigating adolescents’ profiles of choosing a major may add to the conceptualization of how people make career-related decisions. Specifically, it may help to understand whether or not it is important to pay attention to all decisional tasks advanced in career decision-making models. For example, it has been hypothesized that a combination of being highly committed to a career choice (i.e., being attached to, certain and self-confident about career preferences and choices; Blustein, Ellis, & Devenis, 1989) and having experienced a period of career exploration (i.e., eliciting information about oneself and one’s environment and how both interact; Jordaan, 1963) is more beneficial than a combination of the same level of commitment and limited exploration in terms of choice satisfaction, choice stability, and adjustment (Brisbin & Savickas, 1994). However, to our knowledge, this hypothesis has not been tested yet.

From a practical viewpoint, educational guidance may also benefit from the identification of these profiles because they may provide a parsimonious way of describing differences between students’ educational decision-making processes. Such a parsimonious description, in turn, facilitates communication among counselors in educational settings. Insight into these profiles may also guide students’ grouping for tailored assistance in their educational decision-making process (Distefano & Kamphaus, 2006). In the current study, the identity formation literature and its linkages with the career development literature are used as a guiding framework for our hypotheses on the types of educational decision-making profiles that might emerge.

In personal identity research, the distinction between different types of dealing with personally relevant decisions has received a lot of attention. Personal identity formation involves defining who you are, what your goals and values are, and which directions you choose to pursue in life. In Marcia’s (1966) identity status paradigm, which is one of the most important models for research on personal identity formation, adolescent identity development is viewed as a series of crises during which decisions in identity-relevant domains have to be made. Marcia (1966) mainly focused on individual differences in the way these decisions are made. More specifically, he distinguished among four different identity statuses, based on combining high and/or low scores on the dimensions of identity exploration (i.e., active consideration of potential alternative sets of goals, values, and beliefs) and commitment (i.e., attaining a clear sense of self-definition and adhering to choices in identity-relevant domains). These statuses are referred to as achievement (high exploration, high commitment), foreclosure (low exploration, high commitment), moratorium (high exploration, low commitment), and diffusion (low exploration, low commitment).

One important life domains for personal identity formation is the career domain (Grotevant, 1987, Marcia, 1966), in which exploration and commitment are also conceptualized as key components for (career) development (Jordaan, 1963, Super, 1980). Career identity (also referred to as vocational or occupational identity; Skorikov & Vondracek, 2011) is regarded as a core component of one’s overall sense of identity, being not only important for choices in the career domain, but also for giving meaning and structure to a person’s life (Kroger et al., 2010, Skorikov and Vondracek, 1998). Indeed, in several studies, support has been found for a positive relationship between vocational identity, career development, career exploration and commitment on the one hand and identity statuses on the other (e.g., Blustein et al., 1989, Savickas, 1985, Vondracek et al., 1995).

In more recent identity models, authors tried to “unpack” the dimensions of exploration and commitment into a set of more specific processes. This trend towards more process-oriented models is also observed in the career development literature where authors have emphasized additional dimensions within career exploration and commitment. With regard to commitment, recent identity models that build on Marcia’s work emphasize that commitment has different components to it (Bosma & Kunnen, 2001), such as the making of commitments and feeling certain about these commitments (Luyckx, Goossens, & Soenens, 2006). With regard to exploration, both the identity literature (Luyckx et al., 2006) and the career development literature (Flum and Blustein, 2000, Porfeli and Skorikov, 2010) state that it is important to distinguish between broad or general exploration and more detailed or in-depth exploration. In the career domain, broad exploration refers to learning generally about the self and possible careers, whereas in-depth exploration refers to learning about a reduced set of career alternatives that are more aligned with the self (Porfeli & Skorikov, 2010). In line with these newer models, the current study also relied on an elaborate set of dimensions (i.e., decisional tasks) to characterize students’ approach to deciding on a major.

To identify adolescents’ educational decision-making profiles in the current study, six dimensions or decisional tasks were used, which are considered core aspects of the career decision-making process at the micro-level (Germeijs & Verschueren, 2006). More specifically, we aimed to identify different intra-individual combinations of the following six decisional tasks: (a) orientation (i.e., awareness of the need to make a decision and motivation to engage in the career decision-making process), (b) self-exploration (i.e., gathering information about one’s characteristics, including one’s interests, values, and abilities), (c) broad exploration of the environment (i.e., gathering general information about career alternatives), (d) in-depth exploration of the environment (i.e., gathering detailed information about a reduced set of career alternatives), (e) decisional status (i.e., progress in choosing an alternative), and (f) commitment (i.e., strength of confidence in, attachment to, and identification with a particular career alternative). With regard to adolescents’ process of choosing a major in higher education, support was found for the distinctiveness of these six career decisional tasks (Germeijs & Verschueren, 2006).

The present study uses these six tasks, which allows for a differentiated view on possible types of adolescents. The career decisional tasks of environmental (i.e., broad or in-depth) and self-exploration can be seen as equivalent to further refinements of Marcia’s exploration dimension and correspond with the refinements made in current identity and career decision-making research (e.g., Porfeli & Skorikov, 2010). The distinction between decisional status and commitment made in the present study nicely maps onto the distinction between commitment-making and identification with commitment in the current personal identity literature (e.g., Luyckx et al., 2006).

In the country where the present study was conducted (i.e., Belgium) students follow a major from the first year in higher education on. Hence, the educational system and the societal context expect from these adolescents to choose a specific major by the end of high school. Because these environmental expectations may encourage adolescents to work on the decisional tasks as they move towards the end of high school (Grotevant, 1987, Kalakoski and Nurmi, 1998), adolescents’ decision-making profiles are studied at the end of Grade 12.

Our review of the literature on career decision-making yielded nine studies in which different career decision-making types or profiles were identified through the use of cluster analysis (Callanan and Greenhaus, 1992, Chartrand et al., 1994, Kelly and Pulver, 2003, Larson et al., 1988, Lucas, 1993, Lucas and Epperson, 1990, Rojewski, 1994, Savickas and Jarjoura, 1991, Wanberg and Muchinsky, 1992). Cluster analytic techniques group persons in relatively homogeneous clusters based on multivariate observations in such a way that persons assigned to the same cluster have more in common than persons assigned to different clusters (Gore, 2000). Three profiles emerged regularly across studies (Kelly & Pulver, 2003): the chronically indecisive type (i.e., no or low commitment to a career choice, high need for career information, and much negative affect), the developmentally undecided type (i.e., no or low commitment to a career choice, high need for career information, and little negative affect), and the decided or ready to decide type (i.e., little career indecision or being decided upon a career, low need for self- or career information, and little negative affect).

In some studies, not all of these three types could be identified and/or additional profiles emerged. This may be due to the different sets of decisional variables and person characteristics used in the cluster analyses but also to the different samples used in the respective studies (Brown & Rector, 2008). For example, some studies used a general high school sample (e.g., Rojewski, 1994), whereas others selected samples from a general college population (e.g., Wanberg & Muchinsky, 1992). It is clear that the participants in these samples were in different developmental stages and, as a consequence, experienced different socio-cultural expectations regarding their preparation for a career. These differences may explain why some studies could identify, for example, a ‘confident decided type’ (Wanberg & Muchinsky, 1992), whereas others only identified a ‘tentatively decided’ type (Rojewski, 1994).

Typical of the studies on career decision-making types is that they focused mostly on career decision-making at a general or macro level and not on a [specific mini-cycle or] decision-making process at the micro-level. By using more general measures of career (in)decision (e.g., Career Decision Scale, Osipow, 1987) these studies could examine approaches to career decision-making at a macro level (e.g., the future career) rather than the micro-level (e.g., the choice of a major or the choice of a job). Second, in the case that measures regarding decisional tasks were used, only some of the six central career decisional tasks were included. Third, many of these studies used career decisional as well as person variables (e.g., anxiety, self-esteem) to characterize the decision-making type. However, researchers have suggested that the profiles be based on career decisional variables only (Chartrand et al., 1994). The person characteristics should rather be used to examine the external validity of the identified career decision-making profiles. The latter strategy, which is used in the current study, would allow for more straightforward conclusions about decision-making profiles without possible confounding influences from other related variables (Chartrand et al., 1994).

When comparing Marcia’s (1966) four identity statuses with the career decision-making profiles that emerged across different studies, it seems that the ‘decided’ or ‘ready to decide’ type corresponds most with the achievement status and the ‘chronically indecisive’ type with the diffusion status. The ‘developmentally undecided’ type, and similar types described in the career decision literature, such as ‘the undecided student who was exploring self and occupations’ (Savickas & Jarjoura, 1991), seem to correspond with the moratorium status in the identity literature. However, no career decision-making profile has been identified empirically which resembles the foreclosure status. This is in line with the results of Brisbin and Savickas (1994) who found that the most widely used measures of career indecision do not measure foreclosure.

Because specific educational choices can be seen as activities that help to shape the process of constructing one’s career identity (Skorikov & Vondracek, 2011), in the current study the choice of a major in higher education is considered as an identity-relevant choice or as a micro-process in adolescents’ career identity development. Therefore, we studied whether educational decision-making profiles at the micro-level would parallel the four identity statuses in broader life domains (e.g., the career domain) or at the general level.

In the current study, we expected that cluster analysis would reveal at least four educational decision-making profiles among high school students which are similar to the four identity statuses. First and parallel to the achievement status, one profile would be characterized by high environmental (i.e., broad or in depth) and self-exploration and high scores on decisional status. Based on the positive relationship between personal growth (i.e., active engagement in the change process of personal growth) and identity (Robitschek & Cook, 1999), students in this profile are expected to show high scores on orientation regarding making the educational choice. Finally, because the achievement status has been characterized by high identification with the choices made (Luyckx, Goossens, Soenens, Beyers, & Vansteenkiste, 2005), it is expected that students in this first profile score high on commitment with the educational choice. Second, the profile parallel to the foreclosed status would be characterized by low environmental (i.e., broad or in-depth) and self-exploration and high scores on decisional status and commitment to their educational choice (Luyckx et al., 2005). As students in this profile make little effort for exploration, we hypothesize that these students are less motivated to engage in the decision-making process than the achieved individuals and thus would score substantially lower on orientation. In contrast to existing studies that were not able to identify a foreclosed career decision-making profile, we expect to find a profile parallel to the foreclosed status by using a more differentiated set of decisional tasks. Third and parallel to the moratorium status (Marcia, 1980), we expect to find a profile characterized by high environmental (i.e., broad or in-depth) and self-exploration but low decisional status and commitment. Because these students show engagement in the career decision-making process through exploratory behavior, it is expected that this profile is characterized by moderate to moderately high orientation scores. Fourth and finally, the profile parallel to the diffusion status would be characterized by low scores on all decisional tasks (Luyckx et al., 2005, Robitschek and Cook, 1999).

In addition, the external validity of the profiles derived was tested by examining whether individuals in the different profile groups differ as expected on several person variables (i.e., career decision-making self-efficacy, career choice anxiety, and decision-making style), and on academic functioning in higher education (i.e., commitment, academic, and social adjustment).

Person variables that have been used frequently in previous research to differentiate between different career decision-making profiles are feelings of anxiety (i.e., trait anxiety or decision-making anxiety) and beliefs regarding the self (e.g., Chartrand et al., 1994, Kelly and Pulver, 2003, Wanberg and Muchinsky, 1992). In identity research, anxiety and self-beliefs also discriminated well among the identity statuses. Specifically, the two low-commitment statuses (i.e., diffusion and moratorium) have been found to show higher anxiety and more negative self-beliefs than the high-commitment statuses (i.e., foreclosure and achievement) (Kroger, 2003, Luyckx et al., 2008, Marcia, 1980). Therefore, in the current study, we examined the external validity of the educational decision-making profiles obtained by investigating the associations with anxiety and self-beliefs. Because associations with profiles in the domain of career decision-making are examined, domain-specific variables were chosen (Goossens, 2001). More specifically, we used measures of anxiety feelings related to the career decision-making process (i.e., career choice anxiety) and self-efficacy beliefs concerning the ability to complete tasks necessary for making a career decision (i.e., career decision-making self-efficacy).

In addition to career choice anxiety and career decision-making self-efficacy, the degree to which adolescents use a rational decision-making style was used to externally validate the educational decision-making profiles obtained. People who use a rational decision-making style actively seek information and make decisions deliberately and logically (Buck & Daniels, 1985). Persons in the achievement and moratorium statuses tend to use planful and reflective strategies in decision-making in contrast to persons in the foreclosure and diffusion statuses (Blustein and Phillips, 1990, Marcia, 1980, Waterman and Waterman, 1974). Therefore, it is hypothesized that a rational decision-making style would discriminate well between the educational decision-making profiles characterized by high exploration (i.e., achievement and moratorium) and low exploration (i.e., moratorium and diffusion).

The quality of the way a career decision is made, is expected to influence the quality of actualization of the chosen direction in the future (e.g., Gati and Asher, 2001, Harren, 1979, Tiedeman and O’Hara, 1963, Van Esbroeck et al., 2005). However, Kelly and Pulver (2003) stressed that there have been no studies investigating academic or career outcomes associated with the different career decision-making profiles. The current study examined longitudinally the associations between adolescents’ educational decision-making profiles and the quality of subsequent choice implementation (i.e., academic functioning) in higher education. Specifically, we examined whether the different profiles predict commitment to the chosen study and adjustment to higher education during the second year in the chosen major. Because the transition to higher education requires adolescents to adjust in both the social and the academic domain (Gall et al., 2000, Gerdes and Mallinckrodt, 1994), we investigated adjustment to the educational demands (i.e., academic adjustment) as well as adjustment to the interpersonal-societal demands (i.e., social adjustment) of higher education.

Based on reviews by Marcia, 1980, Marcia, 1993 on the relationship between identity statuses and adjustment and based on studies about the associations between identity in the career domain and its outcomes (see Skorikov and Vondracek (2007), for an overview), we expected that adolescents in the achievement profile, and to a lesser extent, in the foreclosure profile, would show the highest commitment to their major and the highest levels of adjustment in higher education. Students in the moratorium profile were expected to show less commitment and adjustment than students in the achievement and foreclosure profiles. Students in the diffusion profile would show the lowest levels of commitment and adjustment.

Section snippets

Participants and procedure

In all, 665 students (300 boys and 365 girls) participated in this study. The students came from 25 high schools in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. Nearly all students were White. They followed general education

Educational decision-making profiles

Latent class cluster analysis on scores for the six career decisional tasks yielded a four latent clusters solution as the most appropriate. First of all, the BIC of the four latent cluster model was the lowest. Next, conditional bootstrap based upon the log likelihood showed that the four latent cluster solution outperformed the three latent cluster solution (p < .0001). Although the five latent cluster solution showed a higher BIC, indicating a deterioration of fit, the conditional bootstrap

Discussion

The present study aimed to empirically derive by means of cluster analysis educational decision-making profiles among adolescents who make a choice of a major in higher education. In addition, the external validity of these profiles was examined. The findings of the present study show that this approach can add to our understanding of differences between adolescents in their approach to educational decision-making.

Using a differentiated set of six career decisional tasks, four clusters were

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