Taiwanese College Students' Process of Major Choice, Work Values, and Psychological Well-Being

The purpose of this study was to investigate Chinese college students from Taiwan in their process of career development. The variables that were studied included personal vs. parental influence on academic major decision making, material and aspirational work values, as measured by Work Value Inventory (Wu, 1996), and psychological well-being as measured by Psychological Well-being Scales (Ryff, 1989).;A sample of 85 Taiwanese college students were recruited from two private universities in Taiwan. Participants included 52 females and 33 males between age 18 to 27.;It was hypothesized that the more college students chose their academic majors themselves rather than being influenced by their parents the better their psychological well-being would be. Results did not support the hypothesis as there was no significant relationship between personal vs. parental influence and psychological well-being of the college students.;A second hypothesis predicted a positive relationship between aspirational work value and psychological well-being, the result indicated that the more students valued aspirational factors in work the higher their level of psychological well-being was. The results also indicated that aspirational work value had about 43% of predicting power of the students' psychological well-being when tested in a multiple regression with material work values. Contrary to expectation, there was also a positive relationship between material work value and psychological well-being, However, in the multiple regression analysis, only the aspirational work value served as the predictor variable for psychological well-being of the college students. Post hoc analyses indicated that those with greater satisfaction with their major showed greater well being. The question remains as to what may lead to greater satisfaction with their major. Implications of the results, limitations of the study and suggestions for future research were discussed. One of the assumptions which may have affected the result is that the samples were only recruited from two universities in the Taipei area. In addition, the limitation of the numbers of majors as well as the small sample size may have hampered the result to achieve generality of representing Taiwanese college students. In addition, the chosen measures, including the two questions for personal vs. parental influence, Work Value Inventory and Scale of Psychological Well-Being, might be problematic.