Desenvolvimento e maturidade de carreira de estudantes universitários: validação de instrumetnos de medida

Abstract

In order to contribute to extend the knowledge about Career Maturity and Development of college students in Brazil and offer instruments to this purpose, this work pursued two aims. The first one was to verify the vadility and reliability of two measure instruments, been the first one widely used in international researches: the Combined Scale of Career Development Attitudes (CDA) and the other one, named Assessment of Attributions for Career Decision Making (AACDM). The second aim was to describe the profile of college students, in regard to the career maturity and development, by comparing the results of different subgroups. To achieve such aims were collected data in three different stages, in which participated 581 college students, from state and private institutions. Students were divided into three sampling groups: the first for semantic validation, the second for statistical (factorial) validation and the third for construct validation. For semantic validation we translated, retranslated, analyzed items and performed an experimental trial. The results from this stage indicated the need for adaptations only in the CDA scale and in the Career Planning (CP) and Career Exploration (CE) dimensions. For statistic validation, was performed factorial analyses and reliability tests in order to verify the instruments structure and accuracy. Results confirmed the factorial structure and indicated satisfactory reliability of CDA scale, as well as CP and CE scales. However, the instrument AACDM showed no acceptable psychometric qualities. For construct validation was performed correlation tests and analyses of variance. The major part of the results of correlation and comparison tests among the groups was coherent to the theoretical expectations. Conversely, the internality of locus of control showed no correlation with the career maturity measures. In relation to the profile of college students, they revealed little involvement in planning career activities, mainly in relation to planning strategies that help them decide which work area to pursue after finishing college. Results about CE scale indicated that the use of information sources, by college students, is basically restricted to professors, professionals and books. Regarding the career decisions attributional style, college students tend to attribute personal and controllable causes to their career decisions. In the same direction, the college students showed, in average, higher internality than externality in the locus of control, in both luck dimension and powerful others, although they tend to disagree about their ability and efficacy to make plans. In conclusion, the results obtained in the three stages of this work provide validity to the CDA scale as an instrument to be used in future researches to make individual diagnosis and evaluate career counseling programs aimed at college students.