College women’s value orientations toward family, career, and graduate school

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Abstract

This study was designed to examine how college women’s valuing of graduate education predicted their intentions to attend graduate school, using a new measure of the valuing of graduate school. A second purpose was to assess relations of college women’s perceptions of the relative importance of family and career to their valuing of graduate education. Two hundred and sixteen college women completed a newly developed survey that assessed these constructs. The items assessing task values were designed to assess components of task value defined by Eccles et al. (1983). Reliability and factor analyses demonstrated that the instrument adequately measured different components of task value. Multiple regression analyses demonstrated that components of task value predicted intentions to attend graduate school. The women were strongly career-oriented, and their orientations to career related positively to their valuing of graduate education.

Introduction

Research in the 1970s and early 1980s demonstrated that college women’s educational and career choices were guided by factors such as value priorities emphasizing family over career, sex-role conceptions regarding which careers were appropriate for females, patterns of encouragement from significant others, traditionality of choice, and expectations for success (see Betz & Fitzgerald, 1987; Fox, Pasternak, & Peiser, 1982; Novack & Novack, 1996; for review). Studies conducted during the late 1980s and early 1990s revealed changing trends in women’s ideas about careers. Researchers found that movement by women into predominantly male occupations was increasing, background differences between women choosing traditional versus non-traditional career paths were becoming less pronounced, and women’s interest in achieving attainment goals (prestige, authority, and high income) was increasing. Further, the gap between the importance females placed on family and career goals was closing, with many women placing a stronger emphasis on career goals (see Betz, 1993; Farber, 1996; Phillips & Imhoff, 1997; for review).

Despite these changes in many women’s attitudes toward careers, recent statistics indicate that many of the higher paying and more prestigious occupations (e.g., architect, engineers, mathematical and computer scientists, natural scientists, physicians, and lawyers) continued to be dominated by men (Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1999). According to the US Census Bureau, the majority of women continue to occupy jobs that conform to female cultural stereotypes. Between the years 1983 and 1998, there was little change in the extent to which women dominated fields such as nursing, teaching and caring for young children, clerical positions, minor accounting jobs, ancillary health care workers, and food service. So although many women’s career attitudes are changing, this is not reflected in their career choices. Researchers thus need to continue to address women’s occupational attitudes and choices to understand better their careers. The present study addressed this issue by examining a central construct in one model of occupational choice, women’s valuing of education, and its relation to intentions to pursue graduate education, an important stepping stone to many prestigious careers.

Researchers have proposed a variety of psychological models that attempt to explain women’s occupational attitudes and choice. For example, Farmer (1985) tested a multidimensional model of career and achievement motivation, examining background, personal, and environmental influences on career aspiration, mastery, and commitment. Women’s long-range career motivation was more vulnerable than men’s to competing role priorities. Furthermore, background variables for women, such as social status, school location, race and age predicted career aspirations more strongly than environmental factors such as parent and teacher support. In addition, the mediating effect of environmental factors on career motivation was stronger for women than for men.

Fassinger (1990) proposed that four major variables (ability, agentic traits, feminist orientation, and family and career orientation) would predict women’s career orientation, math orientation, and career choice. She found that having high ability, liberal sex role attitudes about work and family, and instrumental personality traits such as high levels of self-confidence were the major determinants of career orientation for college women. These variables predicted women’s choices of non-traditional, science-related careers that were high in prestige. O’Brien and Fassinger (1993) replicated Fassinger’s findings in a sample of high school women, and also found that the relationship with mother emerged as an equally important predictor of career orientation and career choice.

Researchers adopting expectancy-value models of achievement motivation have examined a number of career-related processes and work-related outcomes, including the effects of unemployment on job-seeking behavior (Feather, 1992; Lynd-Stevenson, 1999) and willingness of employees to attend union meetings (Flood, 1993). Eccles et al. (1983) developed an expectancy-value model of achievement motivation as a specific framework for understanding adolescents’ performance and choice in mathematics. They proposed that individuals’ performance, persistence, and choice of achievement tasks are most directly predicted by their expectancies for success on the tasks and the subjective value they attach to success on the tasks. Individuals’ expectancies and values themselves are most directly determined by other achievement-related beliefs, including children’s achievement goals and sense of competence. Individuals’ interpretations of their previous performance, and their perceptions of socializers’ attitudes and expectations influence their achievement-related beliefs. Eccles (1987) extended this model to address the issue of career choice, positing that individuals’ expectancies and values are crucial determinants of career choice.

A unique aspect of this model is Eccles and colleagues’ focus on achievement values as a key factor influencing intention and choice. They proposed four major components of the subjective valuing of a task or activity: attainment value or importance, intrinsic value or enjoyment, utility value or usefulness of the task, and cost (see Eccles et al., 1983; Wigfield, Battle, Keller, & Eccles, 2002, for more detailed discussion of these components). Building on Battle, 1965, Battle, 1966 work, Eccles et al. defined attainment value as the importance of doing well on a given task. Intrinsic value is the enjoyment one gains from doing the task; this component is similar in certain respects to notions of intrinsic motivation (see Deci & Ryan, 1985; Harter, 1981). Utility value or usefulness refers to how task completion facilitates future goals, for instance, taking a math class to fulfill a requirement for a science degree. Cost refers to what the individual has to give up to do a task, as well as the anticipated effort one will need to put into task completion.

In her expansion of the model to educational and occupational choice, Eccles (1987) argued that individuals base such choices on their expectancies that they can meet the educational demands and succeed at a given career, and their valuing of that particular educational or occupational goal. Further, Eccles et al. (1983) stated that “one’s perception of the value of an activity is more important in determining one’s decision to engage in that activity, while one’s self-concept of ability is more important in determining one’s actual performance once involved in the activity” (Eccles et al., 1983, p. 113). Task value, then, is the more crucial portion of the model to examine in terms of understanding women’s intentions to pursue a particular career-related activity such as graduate school.

Because they are interested in the overall processes by which individuals make decisions, Eccles and her colleagues have studied both intentions to pursue an activity, and actual choices of which activity to pursue. For instance, Eccles (Parsons), Adler, and Meece (1984) found that task value emerged as the most powerful predictor of students’ educational plans and as the only significant mediator of sex differences in actual course enrollment. Girls were less likely to enroll in math because they valued it less. Meece, Wigfield, and Eccles (1990) also reported that adolescents’ valuing of math was the strongest predictor of their intentions to enroll in advanced math courses.

To date, little empirical work has been done to assess this model with respect to broader educational and career choice. In related work Farmer (1985) found that intrinsic values related to individuals’ choices of difficult tasks, but she did not address all the value components. This study was designed to address this gap in the literature, and had three main purposes. The first purpose was to assess whether the components of task value originally defined by Eccles et al. (1983) and empirically assessed in the mathematics achievement domain by Eccles and Wigfield (1995) could be empirically identified with respect to women’s valuing of graduate education. The second purpose of this study was to assess how different aspects of task value predict college women’s intentions to attend graduate school. Assessing the relations of the cost aspect of task value to educational choice is especially important. As noted above, Eccles defined cost in terms of what individuals have to give up to gain something else. We were interested in how perceived cost related to intentions, given the work reviewed above on women’s concerns about the cost of career attainment. A third issue addressed in this study was how women’s family and career orientation, a construct that can be tied to the cost issue in expectancy-value theory, related to the value they attach to graduate school. As noted earlier, in studies done in the 1980s researchers found that this construct influenced women’s career decisions. More recently, researchers have found that cost may be less of an issue for present-day women, who generally appear to be making plans to combine family and career, with little anticipation of serious role conflict (Hallett & Gilbert, 1997; Langan-Fox, 1991; Phillips & Imhoff, 1997). However, this issue has not been examined with respect to plans for graduate education.

We studied the valuing of graduate education because professional career advancement in many fields is inextricably linked to the attainment of advanced degrees. Betz (1993) noted that decisions individuals make about higher education have a major impact on their career trajectories. Further, Betz and Fitzgerald (1987) outlined the challenges that women, as compared to men, face when they attempt to succeed in higher education. They discussed multiple sources of discrimination that result in thwarted opportunities for females, and identified graduate school as a dangerously discouraging, and often-unforgiving proving ground for women’s abilities. They also pointed to the need for more research on the role that higher education plays in women’s career options and decisions.

In the present study, undergraduate women completed a survey that assessed their orientation towards family and career, and their valuing of graduate education and intentions to attend graduate school. The family and career items assessed the extent to which women viewed themselves as more career or family oriented. The questions about valuing graduate education assessed the various components of task value identified by Eccles and her colleagues: intrinsic value, attainment value, utility value, and cost. The following research questions were addressed:

  • 1.

    Can the components of task value in Eccles’ expectancy-value model, and the relative importance of family and career in adult life, be empirically identified?

  • 2.

    What is the relation between college females’ orientation to the relative importance of career and family in their adult lives and the intrinsic, attainment, utility value, and cost that they associate with the pursuit of graduate school?

  • 3.

    Do the values college women associate with graduate school predict their intentions to attend graduate school?

Section snippets

Participants

The sample consisted of 216 female students recruited from undergraduate classes at a large northeastern university during the spring of 1997. Of these subjects, 189 were enrolled in “traditional” fields of undergraduate study for women, with the largest concentrations in education, family studies, psychology, and criminology. Twenty-seven were majoring in “non-traditional” fields of study for women; eight in physics and/or astronomy, five in engineering, two in architecture, three in

Scale building: Identifying family and career and task value components

Initial exploratory factor analysis with principal axis factoring was run on all 67 items in the FCS and VOE scales. The main purpose of this analysis was to determine if the family and career and task value items were empirically distinct. This analysis, using the eigenvalue greater than one rule, suggested the presence of 15 factors, accounting for 70% of the variance. However, examination of a scree test revealed a flattening of the plot line at about the 10th factor. Consequently, a forced

Discussion

This study provides new information on women’s beliefs about family and career orientation, the nature of their valuing of graduate education, and on how their valuing of graduate education predicts intentions to enter graduate school. Considering first the empirical definitions of the major variables in the model, factor analytic results indicated that for items measuring family and career, one major factor emerged, with very few task value items loading on this factor. Given the dissimilar

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    This article is based in part on a dissertation completed by the first author in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Ph.D. in the Department of Human Development, University of Maryland.

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