for female college students) and common for college females (see
Holland et al., 1997, Appendixes A21 and B1). Her occupational
daydreams are also coherently organized around E and S themes
and are, therefore, congruent with her SDS-generated personality
profile. Like K, she is also very bright yet presents with a much more
differentiated set of Educational Self-Efficacy ratings (ranging from
1 for Art to 10 for History).
Unfortunately, the information that we are provided for a client
with a goal of narrowing possibilities is too incomplete to say much
in detail about specific counseling strategies. In particular, we lack
information on the occupations that were generated through Eās
career course. This information would form an important starting
point for our work with her.
Once we confirm her goals for counseling and discover the
choice options that were generated, our general strategy would focus
on the outcome expectations that she has for each possibility she is
considering and to ensure that these expectations are fully informed
by relevant self- and occupational knowledge. Specifically, we would
first help her identify and prioritize the core requirements that she
has for a career by having her consider and rank order such factors
as her basic interests, work-related values, abilities she wants to use
in a career, educational goals (that is, the amount of education she
is willing to pursue), desired lifestyle, and starting income (see Gati
et al., 1996, for a fuller list of possible considerations). We would
then help her gather necessary information on each possibility that
she is considering and analyze each one in terms of (1) how well it
provides for her core requirements, (2) how it is likely to affect her
feelings of self-worth and social approval, and (3) the types of barri-
ers and supports she might encounter in pursuing it.
Developing accurate outcome expectations and analyzing for
supports and barriers are particularly important from an SCCT per-
spective. Consideration of core requirements represents one way to
foster accurate outcome expectations. Anticipation of how self- and
social approval will be affected by the choice of different options
offers another important way to clarify outcome expectations; such
SOCIAL COGNITIVE CAREER THEORY 301