This study originates with approaching a social problem of youth unemployment due to informatization, globalization and aging of the rapidly changing today''s society, from a standpoint of the development of living for a preventive career education. As Leibowitz(1986) said that a successful career is to have the progress of planning for the management of their own career, in order to respond to changing society, a strategy of career preparation to flexibly adapt to the changing world of work and a variety of situations is required rather than a map out of career to find ''the best one'' among their own characteristics and strong points. Especially, when they are in high school, a specific career preparation behavior is needed. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to empirically verify the structural interrelationship among career preparation behavior and self-determination of the high school students and social support for them. To attain this purpose, based on the advanced researches, the main variables were extracted and the research model established, and then through the empirical data, the validity of the model was verified. Through a theoretical investigation on variables of social support, self-determination and career preparation behavior, structural equation model was established and the validity of the model was analyzed through empirical data.
In consideration of the possibility and easiness of a survey, men and women high school sophomores were surveyed. The survey consists of 65 questions applying to the demographic variables and the main variables, and a total of 619 questionnaires were distributed and 588 questionnaires were returned(the return rate: 96.3%). Except for unreliable responses, 518 questionnaires were used for this study(the rate of effectiveness data: 84.9%). To analyze the collected data, both SPSS 18.0 Hangul version and AMOS 18.0 English version were used, and descriptive statistic analysis, factorial analysis, reliability analysis, correlation analysis and verification on the structural equation model were conducted.
As a result, the structural equation model among social support, self-determination and career preparation has been proved to be valid. Since goodness of fit index on the result of analysis showed a satisfactory level of a selection criteria, it has been proved that the research model that this study established corresponds to the actually collected data.
In addition, it has been showed that the social support has an influence on the career preparation behavior with full mediation of the self-determination, and the self-determination as a personal psychological variable directly and indirectly affects the career preparation behavior. On the basis of these results, discussions on the validity of this study''s structural equation model and the structural interrelationship among social support, self-determination and career preparation have been provided.
In further study, a variety of researches including various social and psychological variables are suggested so that high school students could more efficiently prepare for their career path and furthermore prepare for lifelong learning such as career development and career transition.