Career Exploration and Decision-Making of Turkish Undergraduates: Testing a Social Cognitive Model

Abstract

The present study examined the applicability of the social cognitive model of career self-management (CSM; Lent & Brown, 2013) to career exploration and decision-making in a non-Western, collectivist cultural context. Participants were 451 Turkish undergraduate students who completed measures of self-efficacy, outcome expectations, goals, social support, decidedness, decisional comfort, and affective dispositions (i.e., positive and negative affectivity). The CSM-based latent variable model fit the data well and explained significant variance in career decidedness, comfort, and exploratory goals. The results extend research on the cross-cultural utility of the CSM model, finding that it may aid understanding of the career exploration and decision-making process outside of the national, economic, and linguistic contexts in which it has thus far been tested. Implications for the CSM model as well as practice and future research are discussed.