Exploring Career Motives

JOSÉ EDUARDO MORENO

Denver. Colorado, USA.

Congreso; SRCD 2009 Biennial Meeting; 2009

Society for Research on Child Development

Exploring Career Motives.  José Eduardo Moreno The aim of this poster is to introduce the most recent studies on the validity of the final version of the Career Motives Questionnaire (CMQ), a brief instrument for vocational guidance. The process to construct the CMQ consisted of three main steps: 1-generation of an item pool and a first development scale phase which produced the preliminary form of the CMQ; 2- a validity and reliability study; 3- a second scale development phase which produced the final form of the CMQ (45 items, five scales). This final questionnaire has 45 items (nine for each scale) and evaluates: Altruism (A), Parent Dependency (D), Occupational Satisfaction (OS), Success and Prestige (S) and Concern about the Future (F). In this study the sample was made up of 1,420 argentinian students (715 male and 705 female) between 16 to 20 years old. Estimates of the internal consistency of the five CMQ scales were calculated using Cronbach’s coefficient alpha. These values ranged from .80 to .95. The alpha coefficients of the scales were: Concern about the Future (.89), Parental Dependency (.92), Success and Prestige (.91), Altruism (.95) and Occupational Satisfaction (.80). Item-scale correlations confirmed that all items made an appreciable contribution to the scale’s internal consistency. To examine the scale structure a factor analysis was employed. In the first analysis for extraction of factors we used the principal component method to which oblique rotations Oblimin with Kaiser normalization were applied later. We obtained a structure matrix of five factors with eigen values greater than one and which explain 67.89 % of the variance. The results of the Oblimin rotation showed that all items on the scales were heavily weighted and that they belonged to one scale or another. The five dimensions were included in an orthogonal rotation second order factor analysis which yielded two factors with eigen values greater than one. The first factor described what we defined as immature motives (Concern about the Future, Parental Dependency and Success) and the second factor, mature motivations (Altruism and Occupational Satisfaction). Taking into account the hierarchy of needs that Maslow proposes, Concern about the future, Parental Dependency and Success are more basic needs. For example, Concern about the Future scale refers to people that choose their career as a mean to cope with their future. The safety motives are stronger, more urgent subjectively, and therefore more basic and immature. Our observation seemed to accord with those of Super (1983,1990) who  suggested that career seekers have different degrees of emotional and personal career maturity. We were led to create the Career Motives Questionnaire (CMQ), to ascertain and clarify the personal needs that some adolescents intend to fulfill through their choices of fields of study. We report that the five CMQ scales prove to be satisfactorily reliable and valid. Another conclusion is that there are clearly two types of occupational motivations: mature (Occupational Satisfaction and Altruism) and immature (Concern about the Future, Parental Dependency and Success and Prestige).