Emerging Adulthood And Career Identity: Intergroup Variations In Chinese College Graduates’ Early Career Construction

Emerging adults refer to individuals who consider themselves too old to be adolescents,but not yet full-fledged adults.They are roughly aged from 18-29 years old and are in exploration of possible life direction in career(Arnett,2015b).Together with findings in previous studies,a qualitative study by the author on fourteen Chinese college graduate workers indicates that emerging adulthood can be applied to this understudied group and that the pursuit of an identity-based career is a prominent concern of them.This thesis aims to further test and indigenize emerging adulthood theory in China by investigating the role career-identity and sociocultural factors play in Chinese college graduate workers’ early career construction.The quantitative survey(N=316)measured their emerging adulthood developmental features,career adaptability,career identity,job satisfaction,turnover intention and other basic information.Key findings revealed in data analysis include:(1)The proportion of self-perceived emerging adults is higher than earlier indigenous studies and resembles those found in Western or in more recent Chinese studies;(2)career identity moderates the positive relation between emerging adulthood developmental features and career adaptability;(3)the rural-urban dichotomy moderates the relation between career adaptability and turnover intention;(4)the type of organization’s moderating effect of career adaptability on job satisfaction is significant.Additionally,analysis comparing means reveals a variety of differences across demographic groups.The advancement of this research mainly lies in three aspects.Firstly,responding to the need of investigating the “forgotten half’s” emerging adulthood— it fills the gap of indigenous emerging adulthood studies by employing non-student participants and focusing on their career construction,a topic that has hardly been addressed in former studies of student emerging adults.Secondly,it is the first to test the fitness of theoretical assumptions about emerging adults’ identity-based career exploration in the Chinese cultural contexts.Finally,it reveals cross-cultural differences between China and the West,as well as intergroup variations within the Chinese society,expanding former findings in cross-cultural studies.