Abstract

This study was conducted in order to investigate the relationship among high school students' perceived family communication, their rational career decision-making and career decision-making self-efficacy. A relational model was verified by setting high school students' perceived family communication as a predictor, their career decision-making self-efficacy as a criterion variable, and their rational career decision-making as a mediator. The subject were 709 high school students from two general high schools(N=410) and three industrial high schools(N=299) located in Gwang-ju city and Jeonnam Province. The results of the research are as follows. First, it was found that general high school students' scores in perceived family communication, rational career decision-making and career decision-making self-efficacy were significantly higher than industrial high school students' scores. In perceived family communication, the general high school students showed significantly higher scores than industrial highschool students in 5 subscales such as respect, genuineness, confrontation, self-disclosure, and understanding and concreteness. In career decision-making self-efficacy, general high school students earned significantly higher scores than industrial high school students in two subscales such as information gathering and planning, but not in self-evaluation, goal selection and problem solving. Second, in both groups, their perceived family communication affected positively on their rational career decision-making and career decision-making self-efficacy. However, their rational career decision-making had a partial role as a mediator. Third, perceived family communication affected positively on their rational career decision-making and career decision-making self-efficacy in the group of general high school students, but not in the group of industrial high school students. In the latter, only rational career decision-making affected positively on their career decision-making self-efficacy. Based on the results, some suggestions were made for future research.