High School Students’ Career Decision-Making Process: Development and Validation of the Study Choice Task Inventory

Abstract

During adolescence, one important career-related decision is the choice of a study in higher education. In this article, a new set of measures for different tasks (i.e., orientation, exploration, commitment) that can be distinguished during this career decision-making process was constructed: the Study Choice Task Inventory (SCTI). A sample of 946 high school students (Grade 11 and Grade 12) participated in this study. Results provided support for the construct validity of the SCTI from (a) the examination of the internal structure of the SCTI (confirmatory factor analysis), (b) the investigation of the convergent validity through correlations between the new scales and alternative measures of decisional tasks, and (c) the comparison of the scores across samples in a known-groups validation.