Longitudinal Relationships among Parental Emotional Support, Self-Understanding, and Career Planning in High School Students: An Autoregressive Cross-Lagged Model Analysis

This study examined the longitudinal relationships among parental emotional support, self-understanding, and career planning among high school students using the 6th to 8th waves of the Korea Education Longitudinal Study 2013 (KELS2013), corresponding to the first through third years of high school. After listwise deletion, data from 5,666 students were analyzed using an autoregressive cross-lagged model. The results showed significant autoregressive effects for all three variables. Parental emotional support positively predicted subsequent self-understanding, which in turn positively predicted later career planning. Although the direct effect of parental emotional support in the first year on career planning in the third year was not significant, its specific indirect effect through self-understanding in the second year was significant. These findings suggest that parental emotional support functions as a contextual resource that contributes to career planning by facilitating the development of self-understanding over time. The study highlights the importance of continuous career education focused on self-understanding and developmentally appropriate parental support.