The relative importance of family influences on STEM college students’ expectancy-value beliefs and career decisions

• In Event: The What and How of Parents’ Socialization: Exploring the Bridging Role of Children’s Psychological Processes

Abstract

Support (or lack thereof) from family members is widely recognized for playing a crucial role in the development of children and adolescents’ motivational beliefs (Wentzel, 1998). However, the relative importance of family members compared to other social influences (e.g., peers, teachers) in affecting students’ motivation, and the precise processes through which family members motivate students, are not well understood (Song et al., 2015). Furthermore, work on parent socialization rarely examines college students, despite college being a critical time for the development of career motivation. Situated expectancy-value theory (Eccles & Wigfield, 2020) can advance our understanding of how social support, particularly from family, may influence students’ motivation, by shedding light on whether family members primarily shape students’ competence or value-related motivational beliefs for pursuing certain careers. In the present study, we examined the relative importance of and processes through which family members, compared to other types of social supports (operationalized as friends/classmates, mentors/advisors, and professors/TAs), shaped STEM college students’ motivational beliefs for career decision making.
Participants were 2,229 undergraduate STEM majors from 42 unique courses at a large, southeastern U.S. public university. In an online survey about their career plans (Authors, 2024), participants were given a checklist of different possible supports for career decision-making (including support from family, friends, professors/TAs, and mentors/advisors). Among these options, participants were asked to select the support(s) that had any influence and the support(s) that were most influential on career decision-making. Participants then explained how the most influential support(s) affected their career navigation in an open-ended response (see Table 2) A team of trained coders conducted qualitative content analyses to characterize how students reported that the social supports shaped their task-value and competence related motivational beliefs (defined in accordance with situated expectancy-value theory) for career decision making. Finally, we examined whether the relative importance of social supports functioned similarly across students with different background characteristics (e.g., gender, race/ethnicity, year in college).
Students most often selected interactions with family members as influencing their career decision-making, both overall and as the most influential, relative to interactions with friends/classmates, mentors/advisors, and/or professors/TAs (Table 1). Students predominantly described their social supports as influencing their values and interests, and then to a lesser extent their competence-related beliefs (Table 2). There were no significant differences in these trends by gender or race/ethnicity. Students earlier in college were more likely to select family members as influential compared to those later in college, but family remained most influential across both earlier and more senior college students. Our results underscore the influence that family members can have on students’ motivational beliefs and career decision-making, even throughout emerging adulthood. Results also point to the critical role of family members, and other social influences, for motivating students by promoting their sense of value for particular career paths. Our findings demonstrate that researchers, educators, and policymakers should continue to examine the processes through which parents and family members influence students’ motivational beliefs during college.

Authors

• Trevor Tuma, University of Georgia

• Emily Quinn Rosenzweig, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Xiao-Yin Chen, University of Tennessee

• Paula P. Lemons, University of Georgia