Understanding Student Attitudes toward Majoring in Human Development and Family Science

Abstract

Most prospective students are unfamiliar with Human Development and Family Science (HDFS), which makes building program enrollment among incoming students challenging. This study used the Theory of Planned Behavior (Ajzen, 1991) to conduct a two- stage empirical analysis of attitudes associated with majoring in HDFS. HDFS students demonstrated many significantly different attitudes toward majoring in the field than did non- HDFS students. They possessed more positive attitudes toward the discipline's treatment of human sexuality, its development of interpersonal communication skills, and its potential for strengthening families. These findings may prove beneficial to HDFS departments that want to improve perceptions of the field and build enrollment. Several strategies for program development and communication enhancement are presented. Family science is a relatively young discipline, and as such, does not possess the same recognizability that other social science programs such as psychology or sociology enjoy. Unlike majors such as chemistry, social work, and history, our own experience suggests that Human Development and Family Science (HDFS) tends to be a discovery major , meaning that most incoming college students are unfamiliar with the field and only learn about such programs after they have been on campus a semester or more. Furthermore, once they do hear about HDFS, it is not unusual for students and their parents to have questions about the curricular content of such programs, to wonder how the discipline of family science is distinctive from other social science fields, and to ask about the types of careers that are available to persons with an HDFS degree. This unfamiliarity with the discipline of HDFS may contribute to low numbers of first year students enrolling in HDFS programs, suggesting that those in the field have considerable work to do in terms of educating prospective students, their families, potential employers, and colleagues in other departments about HDFS. A first step in effective education often involves identifying what learners already know, which also serves to reveal what they do not know. The current study sought to discover what prospective students know and do not know about HDFS by comparing their attitudes toward majoring in the field against those of students who have already chosen the discipline. As might be expected, this empirical analysis revealed many significant differences in attitudes between the two sample groups. However, the value of the research came from identifying the specific beliefs and affections responsible for the differences, which might be useful in developing HDFS