The use of cognitive restructuring procedures for the treatment of vocational indecisiveness

Abstract

This study attempted to evaluate the effectiveness of a treatment designed to deal with the cognitions of general anxiety and those believed to be present in individuals undecided about their college major and future vocation. Fifty-seven college students who were attending summer school at a major university volunteered to participate in a group counseling experience designed to help with vocational indecision. The students were given a screening interview and diagnosed as being vocationally indecisive due to their scores on the Occupational Information scale of the CMI. Forty-four subjects were presented with instruments designed to measure five dependent variables related to vocational statues and then randomly assigned to one of three groups: a cognitive restructuring group, an attention placebo group, and a waiting list control group. Two doctoral level graduate students administered the treatments. The CR group was designed to lower general anxiety by increasing the awareness of career misconceptions possessed by the individual and how to cope with these ideas by changing cognitions regarding vocational choice. The placebo group was designed to evaluate changes in career status due to clients' expectance of change. Leaders led discussions of current theories of vocational choice. A waiting list control group was pretested and asked to return at a later date to receive counseling. The group was posttested at the end of the experimental period and referred to other counseling services. Groups were posttested and gain scores calculated for analysis of treatment effects on career decidedness, stage of vocational development, career misconceptions, anxiety experienced in vocational decision making situations, and general anxiety. A 2 X 3 factorial analysis of variance revealed no difference between leaders and no interaction effects between leaders and treatments. A two way factorial analysis of variance revealed no significant sex differences between the treatments on the dependent variable and no treatment by sex interaction on the variables..