Viewing the Career Indecision Profile Within a Theoretical Context: Application of the Social Cognitive Career Self-Management Model

The Career Indecision Profile (CIP; Brown et al., 2012) is an empirically derived measure tapping common sources of career indecision: interpersonal conflict, neuroticism/negative affect, lack of readiness, and choice/commitment anxiety. We adapted the social cognitive model of career self-management (Lent & Brown, 2013) to provide a theoretical structure for these sources of indecision, focusing on how they interrelate and jointly predict career decision progress. Supplementing the CIP's focus on negative decisional influences, the social cognitive model included positive sources of career decidedness, in particular, self-efficacy, mastery experiences, and positive emotions related to decision-making. Three hundred sixty-five college students completed the short form of the CIP (Xu & Tracey, 2017), along with measures of career decision self-efficacy, prior experiences with career decision-making. social barriers, trait conscientiousness and neuroticism. and career decidedness. Factor analytic findings indicated that the CIP's interpersonal conflict, negative affect, and lack of readiness items loaded together with conceptually similar social cognitive, barrier, and personality scales, with lack of readiness items divided between self-efficacy and conscientiousness factors. A path analysis, couching the CIP factors in terms of the career self-management model, provided good fit to the data and accounted for substantial portions of the variance in decisional discomfort (choice/commitment anxiety) and levels of career decidedness. We consider implications of the findings for the study of career decision-making and for practical ways to promote it.