Exploring IT Career Aspirations via Socio-cognitive and Socio-cultural Factors

Abstract Individuals are motivated by different factors due to their unique goals, beliefs, values, and life experiences. By exploring these lived experiences, we can gain valuable insights into human behavior and individuals’ personal understanding of their world (Busch 2015). This qualitative study will use a culturally situated lens to explore the similarities and differences in the information technology (IT) career aspirations of undergraduate students from research-oriented higher education institutions of approximately the same size in the United States (US) and Kuwait. We seek to understand how culture and the educational context motivate (or demotivate) students to pursue a career in the IT field. Situated Expectancy-Value Theory (SEVT; Eccles & Wigfield, 2020) integrates socio-cognitive and socio-cultural perspectives to provide a more comprehensive understanding of motivation. SEVT has been used to understand that expectancy-value beliefs (i.e., individuals’ confidence in their ability to complete a task and how worthwhile the task is) vary across situations and are influenced by situational characteristics. For example, in Kuwait, cultural and societal expectations might prioritize certain careers/professions, such as those in government or family businesses, whereas in the US students might be more influenced by individualistic values and economic advancement, leading to different career aspirations, including those in medical or STEM fields (Armstrong, Zaza, & Deng, 2024). In this research we anticipate exploring the following research questions: RQ1: What cultural norms are revealed in influencing IT major choice? RQ2: How do cultural norms interact with other factors (socio-economic status, gender, personal characteristics) in influencing students’ choice of an IT major? We believe this study may be used to understand how an individuals’ social environment, including family, peers, and cultural norms, may shape their motivational beliefs and IT career aspirations. References Armstrong, D. J., Zaza, S., & Deng, Y. F. (2024). Examining individual differences in IT career choice: Evidence from across the US. In Proceedings of the 2023 Computers and People Research Conference (SIGMIS-CPR '23). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 2, 1. https://doi.org/10.1145/3579168.3632626. Busch, B. (2015). Linguistic repertoire and Spracherleben, the lived experience of language. Working Papers in Urban Language & Literacies, Paper 148. https://heteroglossia.net/fileadmin/user_upload/publication/ WP148_Busch_2015_Linguistic_repertoire_and_Spracherleben-libre.pdf. Eccles, J.S., & Wigfield, A., (2020). From expectancy-value theory to situated expectancy-value theory: A developmental, social cognitive, and sociocultural perspective on motivation. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 61, 101859. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cedpsych.2020.101859.