Confirmation of Candidature - Parent Self-efficacy Support Career-Related

Schools and teachers provide the conduit for career construction. However, parental support provides the necessary resources in the home to enable adolescent career exploration and development (Guan et al., 2016). This proposed research aims to explore the parents' self-efficacy in supporting their children's career decision-making to determine the factors that affect parents' career self-efficacy. The proposed research will build on the pilot study "Parent Self-Efficacy when Supporting Adolescent Career-Related Decisions (Dickens, 2021) which created a draft instrument based on established theory for parents to self-report their efficacy when supporting their adolescent children with career-related decisions. The research uses social cognitive career theory (Lent & Brown, 2008; Lent & Brown, 2013; Lent et al., 2002) as a conceptual framework that represents the major constructs of the research to measure and explain adolescent parent career support self-efficacy. Specifically this research will construct a psychometric measure of parents' self-efficacy for supporting their children's career decision-making, tentatively titled Parent Career Self-Efficacy Scale (PCSES) and test the new PCSES's measurement properties, including its factor structure and invariance (configure, metric, scale) across discrete demographic variables (e.g., parents' age groups, family structure, ethnicity, income).

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