Vocational Interest Patterns And Differentiation Of Junior High School Students

Abstract

Super's Career Development theory indicated that adolescence belongs to the growth stage (4-14 years) and exploration stage (15-24 years). In the two stages, adolescents would not only explore and develop their career interest, but also try to identify the preference for career activities and construct a specific career pattern. In the countries with early and middle educational tracking, students have to face career decision-making when they are still young, and career interests is one of an important information to help them to make career choices. “Interest” means the preference for some types of activities, curricula, and occupations. In the practice of career counseling, vocational interest inventories are frequently used to help students understand their own preference for vocational interests. If one’s interest pattern is congruent with vocation, he/she would have better job satisfaction and adaptive performance. In the past, vocational interest studies were mostly concerned with variable-center analysis of various interest types, which focused on the associations between two or more variables, such as correlation, regression, and multidimensional scaling analysis. In contrast, person-center analysis, such as cluster analysis and latent class analysis, was hardly to be found in vocational interest studies. The purpose of this study was to explore the heterogeneous latent interest patterns among junior high school students using person-center analysis, and to investigate the relationships between gender and latent classes, and grades and latent classes.