Student expectancies concerning persistence in college and sources of conflict leading to withdrawal from college were related to selected precollege performance, scholastic ability, and personality variables. Perceived reasons for college withdrawal generated a 3dimensional space, the defining vectors being academic and work skills and their utilization, motivation, and adjustment. Correlations computed separately for the groups reporting high and low probabilities of college dropout suggested that the former group is more concerned with satisfying the expectancies of their parents and that failure to do so is anxiety and guilt producing. Lack of commitment to educational pursuits coupled with this need to satisfy parental expectancies apparently leads to initially adequate performance but subsequent underachievement. 3 times as many of this group withdraw as do the low probables. Similar differences were observed between remaining and dropout students after 3 terms.
This study appraised the degree to which student profiles on the Jackson Vocational Interest Survey (JVIS) for different academic majors could be clustered in a meaningful way. From an initial sample of 10,134 students, a matrix of mean scores for 131 academic majors on each of 34 JVIS basic interest scales was computed. This matrix was subjected to a singular value decomposition with subsequent orthogonal and oblique rotations of 17 reference axes. The 17 clusters so defined reflected distinct sets of academic major fields, with separate clusters for majors in engineering, computer science, performing arts, communicative arts, human services, and others. Male and female groups entered into the definition of every cluster. Based on the salient representations of academic majors on these reference axes, modal cluster profiles were computed and decomposed into five orthogonal higher-order dimensions. The implications of these findings for the psychology of occupational choice, career development, and vocational interest measurement are outlined.This study was designed to appraise the degree to which the vocational interest profiles of students in different academic major fields in a large, diverse university can be classified into cogent clusters sharing a hierarchical organization.The traditional approach to measuring vocational interests has been to identify a particular educational or occupational group, administer a vocational interest test to the group, contrast their mean item scores with those of a like-gender general group, identify items answered differentially, and develop a scoring key to assess the similarity of a respondent's item responses to the responses of the standardization group. Notwithstanding the past successes of such an approach, difficulties have become evident recently. The use of a large number of standardization groups becomes unwieldy, the multivariate psychological bases for the similarity may not be clear, and problems are posed by (a) the necessity of producing separately keyed scales for males and for females, and (b) correlations among related occupations. We therefore wish to evaluate the degree to which a clustering approach to vocational interest measurement, using basic interest scales rather than individual items, might overcome these difficulties.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.