Examining the occupational aspirations of Taiwanese Aboriginal adolescents based on the developmental-contextual model of career development

Abstract

In Taiwan, the occupational achievement of indigenous people has been well below that of their non-indigenous counterparts. Studies have confirmed that the occupational aspirations of adolescents significantly influence their adult career choices and achievements. Therefore, this study tested the proposed theoretical model of occupational aspirations among Taiwanese Aboriginal adolescents by utilizing the developmental-contextual model of career development as its framework. This study simultaneously examined the relationships among the distal contextual variable (social welfare resources), proximal contextual variables (parental occupational aspirations for the child, school support, and neighborhood cohesion), individual-level variable (self-concept), and occupational aspirations in the proposed model. The data were collected from a questionnaire survey of 564 Taiwanese Aboriginal senior high school students and were analyzed using structural equation modeling. The results supported the proposed research model, which explained 62.6 % of the variance in occupational aspirations. The study found that social welfare resources influenced parental occupational aspirations for the child, school support, and neighborhood cohesion, which, in turn, directly and indirectly influenced occupational aspirations vis-a-vis their effects on self-concept. In turn, self-concept influenced occupational aspirations. Overall, the results confirmed that the proposed model based on the developmental-contextual model of career development was effective in explaining the development of occupational aspirations among Taiwanese Aboriginal adolescents.