Relative Deprivation and Career Decision Self‐Efficacy: Influences of Self‐Regulation and Parental Educational Attainment

Increasingly, attention turns to understanding the career development and vocational behavior of people living outside the United States, who comprise more than 95% of the world's population (S. S. Kim & Williams, 2012). Doing so allows a richer understanding of human behavior and a chance to develop and provide effective interventions (Arnett, 2008). It is also important to understand the unique career development needs and experiences of women given the unique issues they face, such as gender-related challenges (e.g., traditional gender role conflict, glass ceiling), experiences with discrimination, and wage gaps (Gasser & Shaffer, 2014). Although almost 70% of Korean women continue their education after high school, with the majority entering university programs (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2012), women in Korea are in lower positions and receive lower wages compared with men (K. Kim & Han, 2008). Korean female students' deprivation in equal opportunities and its effect on their self-efficacy in the vocational realm should be explored in consideration of protective factors (e.g., self-regulation, parental input) for possible interventions in the career counseling setting. Therefore, we examined dimensions of Korean female college students' career development to understand the process and inform interventions to aid in Korean women's career decisions.Culture and Career PreparationEffective career preparation is one of the major developmental tasks for young adults (e.g., Stringer, Kerpelman, & Skorikov, 2011). One approach to helping young adults enter the labor market involves exploring factors that influence their career-related decisions. The importance of contextual factors, such as family, school, and culture, in students' career development has been noted by many researchers (F. M. Cheung, Wan, Fan, Leong, & Mok, 2013). Specifically, F. M. Cheung (2012) suggested that culturally relevant variables provide a more comprehensive understanding of career development in adolescents. Individuals from a collectivistic culture have high interest in others' thoughts, emotions, and actions (Markus & Kitayama, 1991). Consequently, they are more likely to seek comparison information than are people from individualistic cultures. White and Lehmann (2005) supported this notion, stating that to fit into their in-groups, people from collectivistic cultures engage in comparisons with members of the same community to assess norms. Such constant comparison is likely to result in a belief that one is in a worse standing compared to others, a belief termed relative deprivation (Smith, Pettigrew, Pippin, & Bialosiewicz, 2012).Studies on Korean female college students' career issues have focused on helping them to overcome career barriers in consideration of selfregulation, which is the tendency to regulate one's behavior to achieve the career goal. This research found that self-regulation increased students' career decision self-efficacy and career exploration behaviors (e.g., M. Kim & Kim, 2014). However, a dearth of studies have examined the impact of relative deprivation. Some studies address the impact of relative deprivation on Korean women's daily and social/career lives, caused by their relatively low status compared with that of men (e.g., K. Kim & Han, 2008) and the collectivistic nature of the culture in which competition produces relative deprivation among students (e.g., White & Lehman, 2005). Thus, our study aimed to contribute to the cross-cultural career development literature by examining the role of a new contextual variable that is highly relevant in Asian culture, relative deprivation, on the career-related outcomes of Korean women.Relative DeprivationAccording to relative deprivation theory (Smith et al., 2012), individuals compare themselves to others in their in-groups, which results in internal responses and individually oriented behaviors. …