Information-theoretical approach to the analysis of students' plans for their future careers

Abstract

The article provides a statistical analysis of students' intentions regarding the choice of work after graduation. The data of a survey of students on the assessment of the importance of various motives for choosing targets are used. The main goal was to find the structure of the set of intentions, which is expressed in the form of a graph of direct connections. The interrelationships between assessments of intentions define the typology of students according to their target orientation. Due to the integrity of the intent measurement scale, two ways of evaluating relationships could be used: standard correlation and information-theoretic. As calculations have shown, both methods give similar results. For the analysis, those direct connections that were identified by both methods were used. This confirms to a certain extent the possibility of using Shannon information to find direct connections by the method of partial correlations in the case of nominal scales. The found graph of direct connections revealed the typology of students' intentions and thus allows us to talk about the students themselves.