WORK-VALUECLARIFICATION AND COGNITIVE INFORMATION PROCESSING THERAPIES IN THE MANAGEMENT OF CAREER DECISION-MAKING DIFFICULTY OF SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS IN OSUN STATE, NIGERIA

Abstract

Career decision-making difficulty is thelack of readiness and/or motivation of an individual to choose a suitable decision, a situation that is common with secondary students. Studies have shown that the problem of career decision-making difficulty among secondary school students in Osun State, Nigeria is on the increase, which could lead to the wrong choice of school subjects and career frustration. Previous studies on career decision-making difficulty have focused largely on emotional intelligence, academic motivation, and occupational preferences with little attention paid to interventions such as Work-value Clarification Therapies(WvCT) and Cognitive Information Processing Therapy (CIPT). This study, therefore, was carried out to determine the effects of Work-value Clarification and Cognitive Information Processing Therapies in the management of Career decision-making difficulty of secondary school (SS) students in Osun State, Nigeria. The moderating effects of career self-efficacy and gender were also examined. The study was anchored to Miller-Tiedeman’sLife Career Theory, while the pretest-posttest control group quasi experimental design with a 3x2x2 factorial matrix was adopted. The multistage sampling procedure was used. The simple random sampling technique was used to select three (Ayedaade, Isokan, and Ede) Local Government Areas (LGAs) in Osun State out of 30 local governments. The simple random sampling technique was used to select one SSS from each of the selected LGAs. The participants,who scored above average (50%) on Germeijs and Boecks Indecisiveness Scale which was a screening tool, were selected. The schools were randomly assigned to Work-value clarification Therapy (WvCT- 40), Cognitive Information Processing Therapy (CIPT-40) and Control (40) groups. The instruments used were Career Decision-making Difficulty (г = 0.78) and Career Self-efficacy (г = 0.87) scales. The treatment lasted eight weeks. Data were analysed using descriptive statistics, Analysis of covariance and Scheffe post-hoc test at 0.05 level of significance. Participants’ age was 15.36+ 3.51years, and 54.2% were females. There was a significant main effect of treatment on the CDMD of the participants(F(2; 119) =9.26; partial η2 = 0.15). The participants in the CIPT(x ̅= 134.97) improved on their career decision-making difficulty better than those in the WvCT (x ̅ = 135.25) and the control (x ̅= 152.55) groups respectively.There was no significant main effect of gender and CSE on the career decision-making difficulty of the secondary school students. There were no significant interaction effects of treatment and gender as well as treatment and career self-efficacyon career decision-making difficulty. The three-way interaction effect was also not significant.

Work-value clarification and cognitive information processing therapies were effective in the management of career decision-making difficulty of secondary school students in Osun State, Nigeria, regardless of gender and career self-efficacy. Counselling and educational psychologists should utilise these interventions to manage career decision-making difficulty.