The role of personality in the selection of a major: With and without vocational self-efficacy and interests

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine the role of personality traits measured by the Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire (MPQ; Tellegen, 2000 andTellegen and Waller, 2008) in selecting educational majors. Personality traits were examined alone, and with the combination of Holland's hexagonal confidence domains, as measured by the general confidence themes (GCT) of the Skills Confidence Inventory (SCI; Betz, Borgen, & Harmon, 2005), and Holland's interest domains, as measured by the general occupational themes (GOTs) of the 2005 Strong Interest Inventory (SII; Donnay, Morris, Schaubhut, & Thompson, 2005). Personality traits significantly contributed to the discrimination of nine educational major families in a sample of 368 undergraduate decided students. When the set of confidence and interest scales was added to the personality traits, the conservative jack knife hit rate was almost doubled. Keywordsconfidence, self-efficacy, personality traits, interests, college major, MPQ, Choice actions Disciplines Educational Psychology | Higher Education | Industrial and Organizational Psychology | Personality and Social ContextsComments NOTICE: this is the author's version of a work that was accepted for publication in Journal of Vocational Behavior. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Journal of Vocational Behavior, [76, 2 (2010) Running head: Personality, Self-efficacy, and Interests 1 NOTICE: this is the author's version of a work that was accepted for publication in Journal of Vocational Behavior. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Personality, self-efficacy, and interests 2 AbstractThe purpose of this study is to examine the role of personality traits measured by the Multidimensional

The CPAI-2 as a Culturally Relevant Personality Measure in Differentiating Among Academic Major Groups

“…Our results are quite consistent with their findings, except for the difference between the accounting major group and the engineering major group found in the third function. Although other similar research studies did not explicitly highlight this kind of differentiation (Larson et al, 2007;Larson et al, 2010), the structural matrix of Larson et al (2010) did reveal a similar (but smaller) differentiation pattern in their second discriminant function when MPQ personality scales were used as the predictors. Although the correlations between their second discriminant function and the MPQ Social Potency and Social Closeness scales were only .19 and .23, respectively, the trend of their result is quite consistent with our findings.…”

“…In our present sample, the gender proportions in the six major groups are not balanced. We control the effect of gender by inputting it as the first predictor and then examine the additional utility of personality beyond the effect of gender (Larson, Wu, Bailey, & Gasser, 2010). Although using a categorical variable as a predictor would violate the assumption of multivariate normality, which may increase the misclassification rate (Finch & Schneider, 2006;Tabachnick & Fidell, 2007), we followed the common practice adopted in previous studies for easier comparison of the results between our studies and the previous ones.…”

“…To investigate the relationship between personality and academic major groups more comprehensively, Larson, Wu, Bailey, and Gasser (2010) used the Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire ([MPQ] Tellegen, 2000) as the personality measure. Six personality scales of the MPQ can be used as markers of the Big Five and the remaining five MPQ personality scales can be treated as additional traits beyond the Big Five.…”

Leadership Intentions of Young Women

“…The 11 specific traits subsumed under the Big Three (i.e., positive emotional temperament, negative emotional temperament, and constraint; Tellegen, 2000;Tellegen & Waller, 2008) significantly differentiated choice actions as well (Larson et al, 2010). In short, some of the Big Five personality traits and some personality traits subsumed under the Big Three have been shown to contribute to differentiating among some intentions and choice actions.…”

Toma De Decisiones Académico-Profesionales De Los Estudiantes Preuniversitarios

“…Sin embargo, la principal conclusión de esta investigación no se fundamenta únicamen te en la definición de estos perfiles, sino tam bién en el estudio de las progresivas similitudes y diferencias entre ellos. De esta forma, en este estudio se está avanzando en la investigación sobre la toma de decisiones, que habitualmente ha parcelado las diferentes variables sin vincu larlas entre sí (Sobrado y Cortés, 2009;Larson et al, 2010), apoyado en un análisis de corres pondencia múltiple.…”