Motives of Chinese Students to Choose Journalism Careers

Abstract

Motives of journalism students to enter journalism have been studied for several decades in some countries. Still many questions remain unanswered, such as the discrepancy between the growing number of female journalism students and still male-dominated journalistic work force. In China, the study of motivations of journalism students takes even more urgency because it is still unstudied area. This study constitutes the first national survey to examine the motivations of Chinese journalism students to choose journalism as their major and possible reasons for their choice. Related studies Researchers have looked at various factors that may have influenced students' motivations to enter journalism - including age, gender, family background, teachers, and advisors' advice. For example, in their study of journalism students from 22 countries, Splichal and Sparks (1994) examine two sets of factors explaining choice the external and internal factors. The internal factors were the reasons that students gave for their desire to study journalism. These were student judgments about the kind of career that they intended to enter, such as whether it provided them with a chance to tap into their potential and ability, or whether it provided a generally attractive occupation with high social status or material benefits. External factors refer to the sources of information and opinion upon which the students based their choices. When choosing a major, students were obviously exposed to different kinds of influences with regard to their eventual choice, including various forms of career advice, formal and informal, provided by the family, friends, teachers, counselors, and peers that can be classified as external factors. Splichal and Sparks (1994) say that the external factors were important, since they would help identify the ex- tent to which the specific professional attitudes were grounded in personal knowledge outside of the educational system, or whether they might be thought to be a product of journalism education or professional socialization itself. The internal factors, on the other hand, would give some idea of the personal factors that students believe impelled them to study journalism. One of the most widely known theories of behavioral motivation is the hierarchy of needs theory, developed by psychologist Abraham Maslow, which argues that individual needs form a fivelevel hierarchy (Bartol and Martin, 1994). According to this hierarchy, the highest level need, self-actualization, is met through developing our capabilities and reaching our full potential. We try to satisfy this need by testing our creativity, seeing our innovative ideas translated into reality, pursuing new knowledge, and developing our talents in uncharted directions. Motivation is the force that energizes behavior, gives direction to behavior, and underlies the tendency to persist (Bartol and Martin, 1994). Although in previous studies of journalists and journalism students such needs to tap into one's capability were sometimes cited as a motivation for them to enter journalism, a desire to write has been consistently identified as the dominant motivation in various studies (Weaver and Wilhoit, 1996; Parsons, 1989; Bowers, 1974). Similarly, Splichal and Sparks find in their study of journalism students from 22 countries that students' confidence in their writing ability was a top factor for their choice of journalism. Wei (1996) also reports that the majority (58%) of Hong Kong journalism students said they chose journalism because of their aptitude for writing. Some researchers have tried to categorize motivating factors in order to understand better the motivations. When examining the attractions of the journalistic profession in the United States in the 1990s, Weaver and Wilhoit (1996, p.51) identified some common themes - the most often cited were an early `love' of writing, aptitude for the `digging' of reporting, a desire to `make a difference,' and the field's being intrinsically `interesting'. …