مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

People must make occupational decisions over their entire lifespan (Hartung, Porfeli, & Vondracek, 2005). Empirical research suggests that occupational decisions are among the most powerful factors that influence people‟s lives (Hackett & Betz, 1995). At a minimum, being undecided can hinder people from taking control of their careers (Savickas, 2013). Consequently, career indecision is among the most researched issues in vocational psychology (e.g., Gati, Krausz, & Osipow, 1996), and exploring its persistence and stability over time are crucial issues in this field of research. Compared to career indecision, indecisiveness is considered a chronic and stable trait variable, which manifests not only in the process of occupational decision-making but also in other life domains (Osipow, 1999). However, the stable component of career indecision (i.e., career indecisiveness) has hitherto not been investigated with an appropriate research design and methodology. To date, studies investigating the persistence of career indecision over time are rare, and studies assessing indecisiveness have usually employed questionnaires asking participants to directly indicate their indecisiveness. Extending these studies, the present paper uses latent state-trait analysis (LST; Steyer, Schmitt, & Eid, 1999) based on longitudinal data from three samples and different time lags to empirically derive the situation-specific and stable components of career indecision during the early yet critical career development stage at university. We also seek to clarify the links among the stable component of career indecision, personality and career variables as well as psychological well-being (i.e., satisfaction with life). The specific aims of the present paper are to (1) empirically assess the stable component of career indecision, (2) explore how the stable component of career indecision is associated with personality (i.e., core self-evaluations) and career-related variables (i.e., occupational self-efficacy, perceived career barriers), (3) investigate how the stable component of career indecision is related to life satisfaction, and (4) evaluate the combined and unique effects of the stable component of career indecision and generalized indecisiveness on life satisfaction. Our study contributes to the existing research in several ways. First, we extend the understanding of career indecisiveness by providing new insights into the persistence and stability of career indecision over time. Second, we extend the nomological net of empirically assessed career indecisiveness by exploring correlates to personality characteristics as well as career-related variables. Third, the study clarifies the significance of empirically assessed career indecisiveness by demonstrating its predictive validity in comparison to generalized indecisiveness (assessed at a single measurement point) regarding life satisfaction.