مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

Adolescence is an important period in the context of career development because it is the time when people prepare themselves for the world of work and develop a vocational identity (Skorikov & Vondracek, 2007). In the course of developing a vocational identity, children and adolescents learn about their personal characteristics like interests, values, and capabilities. They also contemplate on what occupations suit their personal characteristics based on direct and indirect search about the outer world, which is altogether regarded as career exploration (Patton & Porfeli, 2007).

Exploration is considered as one of the key processes for identity establishment (Erikson, 1959) but intra-individual and interindividual variability exists in the level of exploration. For example, Kalakoski and Nurmi (1998) found that the activity of exploration is age-graded as well as socially embedded indicating that the nature and degree of exploration changes within a person over time but can also vary across people depending on their current situations. Antecedents that are known to explain variance in career exploration are motivational factors, such as self-efficacy, career interests, and achievement-orientation (Blustein, 1988, 1989; Creed, Patton, & Prideaux, 2007; Nauta, 2007; Schmitt-Rodermund & Vondracek, 1999), as well as contextual factors, such as parental behaviors (Kracke, 1997; Kracke & Schmitt-Rodermund, 2001). However, existing research typically employed crosssectional data with fewer studies examining the question with a longitudinal dataset. Thus, we know little about how intraindividual variability accounts for career exploration. Further, a majority of the studies that examined antecedents of career exploration treated exploration as a one-dimensional construct. However, recent research suggests that career exploration can be observed in two different forms, namely in-breadth and in-depth exploratio.observed in two different forms, namely in-breadth and in-depth exploration (Porfeli & Skorikov, 2010), and that they can have differential effects on one’s vocational development (Porfeli & Lee, 2012).

The present study builds upon previous literature on how motivational factors are associated with career exploration behavior. It adds to the existing literature by differentiating two different types of career exploration behavior as focal outcomes of interest. In addition, the present study employs longitudinal data to assess how between-person differences as well as within-person variability in motivational factors explain the variance in career exploration.