Applying a Systemic Procedure to Locate Career Decision‐Making Difficulties

Locating clients' career decision-making difficulties is one of the first steps in career counseling. The authors demonstrate the feasibility and utility of a systematic 4-stage procedure for locating and interpreting career decision-making difficulties by analyzing responses of 626 college students (collected by Tai, 2007) to the Career Decision-making Difficulties Questionnaire (CDDQ; Gati, Krausz, & Osipow, 1996). In addition, the responses of 2 students selected from this group are individually analyzed and interpreted. The procedure makes it possible to map the various career decision-making difficulties of undergraduate students and tailor the appropriate career counseling intervention to the unique needs of clients. Making career decisions is not an easy task; indeed, career decisionmaking difficulties are among the most prevalent vocational problems of individuals (Amir & Gati, 2006; Osipow, 1999). Such difficulties may result in avoiding the career decision-making process, halting it, or making a less than optimal career decision (Gati, Krausz, & Osipow, 1996). Regretting a career choice can have financial and psychological consequences (e.g., spending an additional year at college, negative effect on the individual's self-esteem). Locating the focuses of clients' difficulties in making career decisions is the first step toward helping them overcome or minimize these difficulties. The goals of the current article are to demonstrate the clinical applicability of a recently developed four-stage model for interpreting clients' career decision-making difficulties (Amir, Gati, & Kleiman, 2008) by analyzing the responses of college students to the Career Decision- making Difficulties Questionnaire (CDDQ; Gati et al., 1996) and to discuss some challenges involved in such an interpretation. To meet Tinsley's (1992) challenge that career indecision research needs a better theoretical foundation, Gati et al. (1996) proposed a taxonomy of career decision-making difficulties (see Figure 1 ), which consists of three major clusters and 10 specific difficulty categories. This taxonomy is based on the application of the concepts and principles of decision theory to the description and analysis of the career decisionmaking process (Gati & Asher, 2001; Gati & TaI, 2008). In addition, it provides a theoretically based, systematic framework for locating the focuses of a client's career decision-making difficulties (Amir et al., 2008). The taxonomy distinguishes between difficulties that arise prior to engagement in the career decision-making process and those that arise during the actual process. It also distinguishes between those difficulties that arise because of a lack of information and those involving the use of information. On the basis of the proposed taxonomy, Gati et al. (1996) developed the CDDQ. In the CDDQ, each of the 10 difficulty categories (sec Figure 1 ) is represented by a number of statements, and the client is asked to rate (on a scale from 1 to 9) the degree to which each statement describes him or her. The client's pattern of career decision-making difficulties is represented by a profile of the scores on 10 difficulty scales (corresponding to the 10 difficulty categories), in which each scale score is defined as the mean of the items' ratings. Previous research has supported the reliabilitv and the construct and concurrent validities of the CDDQ (e.g., Amir & Gati, 2006; Gati et al., 1996; Osipow & Gati, 1998). The CDDQ was found to be useful for assessing clients' career decision- making difficulties, and the conclusions drawn from it regarding the focuses of client's career decision-making difficulties are compatible with the difficulties reported by their career counselors (Gati, Osipow, Krausz, & Saka, 2000). The CDDQ has been used to measure clients' career decision -making difficulties as part of an initial diagnosis or intake (Gati et al. …