1991; Ravlin & Meglino, 1987). Although these and other research-
ers did not identify the social values(whether the individuals main-
tained a social value or not) of the people studied, they were for the
most part European Americans who typically value individualism
(Carter, 1991).
To this point, no research has been produced that examines the
occupational decision-making process in the absence of occupa-
tional alternatives that will satisfy the values of the decision maker,
and thus this aspect of Proposition 1 is unsupported. Research by
Judge and Bretz (1992) has shown that the availability of values-
based information is influential in the occupational choice process.
In their research, values-basedinformation was defined as informa-
tion that clearly demonstrates which values would be reinforced in
the workplace. In addition, Feather (1988) studied the occupational
choice-making process of college students. He found that self-efficacy
became an issue in the process of choosing an occupation when one
of the options being considered required more rigorous (numerous
skills and abilities were required) preparation than the others.
There is support for the idea that self-efficacy plays an important
role in shaping the list of occupations that are considered when occu-
pational decision making takes place (see Betz, 2000). However,
recent research on social cognitive career theory (Lent at al., 1996)
explored the relationship between outcome expectations and self-
efficacy in predicting what Gore and Leuwerke (2000) term occupa-
tional considerations.Gore and Leuwerke asked a gender-balanced
sample of college students to rate (1) their occupational self-efficacy
beliefs regarding eighty-four occupational titles, (2) their occupa-
tional outcome expectations regarding the same eighty-four occu-
pations, and (3) the extent to which they might consider each of the
eighty-four occupations. Outcome expectations accounted for 30
percent of the common variance associated with occupational con-
siderations, and self-efficacy beliefs accounted for 24 percent of the
common variance. The hierarchical regression with occupational
considerations as the dependent variable yielded beta weights for the
two variables of .42 and .32, respectively. The study is cited as sup-
474 CAREER CHOICE AND DEVELOPMENT