The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of the ego-resilience and school adjustment of college students and their interaction with educators, which were very crucial variables for school life, on their career decision-making autonomy in an effort to boost their intrinsic motivation, career decision making and career decision-making autonomy. And it's also meant to investigate the relationship and influence of these variables and their subfactors for the purpose of a more perfect understanding of the emotional and academic characteristics of college students and their characteristics of campus life, to check the influential factors for their career decision-making autonomy, to provide efficient career counseling and ultimately to improve their career planning, career preparation and career choice. In addition, how to bolster their intrinsic motivation(the subfactors of career decision-making autonomy involving confirmed motivation and intrinsic motivation) was explored.
The subjects in this study were 982 students who were selected by random sampling from among every student in three colleges in Gangwon Province. After hypotheses were formulated, six instruments were utilized to survey the selected students to gather data to test the hypotheses. The data from 891 students who included 489 male students and 393 female students were analyzed except for the incomplete answer sheets from 12 students. Out of the respondents, 239 students were teens, and 556 students were in their early 20s. 85 students were in their mid-20's or older. 173 students majored in humanities, and 418 students were in the departments of science and engineering. 173 students belonged to the colleges of education, and 116 students majored in art, music or physical education. The number of the freshmen, the sophomores and the juniors respectively was 273, 232 and 318, and 56 students were in the year of senior or in the higher academic years. The statistical package PASW 18.0(IBM, the United States) was employed to make a statistical analysis of the data.
A multiple regression analysis was carried out to determine the influential factors for career decision-making autonomy. The selected independent variables were ego-resilience, school adjustment and educator-student interaction. As there was a close correlation among the subfactors of the variables, multic이linearity was likely to take place. To remedy the situation, ego-resilience, school adjustment and educator-student interaction factors were more segmented by gender, major and academic year, and three ego-resilience factors, three school-adjustment factors and four educator-student interaction factors were selected. But multicollinearity also was highly likely to take place because there was a close correlation among the subfactors of the instruments(.400 or more), and a regression analysis was made by linking all the related factors. In other words, the variables were categorized into three. The first category consisted of the emotion-related variables, which were interpersonal ego-resilience, emotional ego-resilience, emotional school adjustment and emotional educator-student interaction. The second was composed of the academic variables, which were curiosity-related ego-resilience, academic school adjustment and academic educator-student interaction. The third consisted of the variables related to campus life, which were vitality-related ego-resilience, life-related school adjustment and daily educator-student interaction.
The findings of the study were as follows:
First, there were partial differences among the college students in ego-resilience, school adjustment, educator-student interaction and career decision-making autonomy according to their background variables involving gender, age, major and academic year.
Second, there was a close significant correlation among the ego-resilience, school adjustment, educator-student interaction and career decision-making autonomy of the college students.
Third, the emotional characteristics, academic characteristics and campus-life characteristics of the college students exerted a significant influence on their career decision-making autonomy.