English abstract
The paper reports a study which develops a career decision-making indicator scale for school students. Using data from 1880 high school students, a series of five studies developed and validated a measure of the Career Decision Making Indicator (CDMI) tailored to adolescents in Oman. The CDMI measures the individual along eight dimensions: Decidedness, Comfort, Career Choice Anxiety, External Barrier, Need for Career Information, Readiness, Career Salience, and Inconsistent Information. The scale has been validated through a scientific method in order to ensure its reliability and validity. Two advanced statistical methods were used, namely: Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory factors analysis (CFA). The EFA was used to identify the underlying dimensions of each construct of the instrument, while CFA was used to confirm the dimension and to analyze the fitness of the data collected in hypothesized model. The results provide evidence that the developed scale achieved sound psychometric properties. The overall reliability value of Cronbach's Alpha was .935. The result of EFA showed that, the Career Decision Making Indicator construct produced eight significant factors. The CFA results showed that the goodness-of-fit indices for the hypothesized model were as follows: χ2 =1674.711, df= 674, CMIN/df= 2.485, CFI=.917, GFI= .930, AGFI=.919, PCOLOSE =1.00 and RMSEA =.036; each of the indices was above the threshold value. Results imply that CDMI is a valid measure to describe the career decision pattern among adolescents. However further studies are recommended to further validate the scale.
