Influential Factors in Academic and Career Self-Efficacy: Attachment, Supports, and Career Barriers

Academic self-efficacy, or confidence in one's ability to perform academic-related tasks, plays an instrumental role in college success (Robbins et al., 2004). Equally important is career decision-making self-efficacy, or the ability to make an informed decision about a career path to pursue in the process of securing meaningful employment. Individuals' academic and career decision self-efficacy are often influenced by their social supports and barriers, as well as their personality. In the present study, we examined factors that influenced college students' academic and career decision self-efficacy, which will add to the current knowledge in the field regarding theory and practice for counselors. Theoretical Framework Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT) SCCT (Lent, Brown, & Hackett, 1994, 2000) provides a framework for understanding the interrelationships of the variables under investigation: attachment, career barriers, social support, academic self-efficacy, and career decision self-efficacy. SCCT posits that person inputs and background contextual factors influence people's learning experiences, which are later referenced as sources of self-efficacy. Person inputs, according to SCCT, are defined as individual difference variables, such as personality dispositions, gender, ethnicity, or other personal factors that may influence career development (Lent et al., 1994). For example, through gender role socialization, men and women may pursue either traditional or nontraditional types of careers. Furthermore, personality dispositions have often been linked to career environments (Holland, 1997). Multiple empirical studies have been conducted by conceptualizing personality factors as part of SCCT's person inputs (e.g., Rogers & Creed, 2011; Schaub & Tokar, 2005; Wright & Perrone, 2010). Although SCCT does not specifically mention attachment orientation as part of person inputs, given the influential and overlapping nature of attachment and personality (Thompson, 2008), attachment orientation can be viewed as part of SCCT's person inputs (Wright & Perrone, 2008) and is an important individual difference variable to consider. In addition to influencing learning experiences, person inputs also influence two other key areas related to individuals' career development: background contextual factors and proximal contextual factors (see Figure 1 in Lent et al., 2000). Background contextual factors are variables that help shape individuals' career interests based on the prior learning experiences they have encountered (Lent et al., 2000). For example, the background factor of a person's environmental resources may have offered or limited prior learning opportunities to develop various skills while growing up. Proximal factors, such as perceptions of supports and barriers to academic or career success, operate by continually influencing individuals' academic and career development, as well as self-efficacy beliefs (Lent, 2005). It is the proximal factors that are particularly important during the active phases of educational or career decision making (Lent et al., 2000). For instance, career contacts or academic advisors may actively help individuals pursue various career paths; however, other proximal factors may impede their career pursuits, such as not being accepted into a particular degree program or limited job availability. Building on SCCT from Bandura's (1999, 2000) work, Lent et al. (2003) demonstrated empirically that supports and barriers play a prominent and active role in directly affecting self-efficacy. Thus, as individuals perceive others as supportive and perceive few career barriers, this will theoretically influence the process of increasing their self-efficacy in academics and career decision making. Furthermore, person inputs, particularly attachment style, also theoretically affect the SCCT proximal variables of supports and barriers. Integration of SCCT and Attachment Theory Although SCCT accounts for attachment relationships as person inputs, integrating attachment theory (Bowlby, 1973) with SCCT will help further explain how attachment relationships influence individuals' career development (Wright & Perrone, 2008). …