Career Decision-Making Self-efficacy, Negative Career Perception, and Mental Health Issues among Undergraduates

The study was done to examine the relationship among “Career Decision-Making Self-efficacy”, negative thoughts related to career, and mental health issues among university undergraduates’ gender and discipline differences were also investigated. A convenient sampling technique was used to recruit the participants (N = 300, 150 from pure science, and 150 from humanities) with age ranges of 18-23 years (M = 21.75, SD = 1.07). Demographic information form, career decision self-efficacy scale, career thoughts inventory, and DASS-21 were employed to assess the study variables. The results of the Pearson product moment correlation coefficient revealed inverse relationships between career decision formulation confidence and negative thoughts related to career, decision-making uncertainty, commitment-related anxiety, and psychological distress indicators. Conversely, negative thoughts related to career exhibited strong positive associations with uncertainty related to decision formulation and commitment-related anxiety. Male participants demonstrated higher levels of career decision formulation confidence compared to female counterparts. In contrast, female participants reported elevated levels of negative thoughts related to career and depressive, anxious, and stressful symptoms. The results also revealed that students from pure sciences departments exhibited significantly lower “Career Decision-Making Self-efficacy”, higher “Negative Career perception”, stress, anxiety and depression compared to their counterparts in the social sciences departments. The study’s limitations and directions for future research are also addressed.