VALUES AND EXPECTATIONS FOR ACHIEVING PROFESSIONAL GOALS AMONG HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATES

Abstract

Plenty of space in psychological literature was dedicated to professional orientation of students, where the role of school, peers, parents, material and social factors was more studied while the role of personality traits, goals, expectations, personal and social values was studied less. This paper is focused on preference of personal and social values that we have defined as certain goals which are important within the context of choice of faculty, and thus, the future profession. We used two lists of goals - 18 personal and 18 social, which were applied to the sample of 497 high school graduates, where the sample consisted of 37,4% boys and 62,6%  girls. The study was conducted in the field, at the end of 2014/2015 school year, within standard school conditions. Preference and level of goal importance the respondents expressed by giving only one answer for each personal and social value at the 5-point Likert- type scale, which enabled application of descriptive statistics methods, correlation and discriminant analysis in statistical data processing. The study results show that there are significant differences in preference of certain goals, as well as relation between importance of goals with expectations for achieving them through choice of faculty and future profession. Also, there is relation between the level of desire for doing the preferred profession and level of expectations that one may achieve his/her goals through the profession.  In addition, it is shown that there are significant differences in the level of accepting certain goals as values, where more importance is given to personal than to social values, which is verified by validity of the author’s initial attitude that personal and social values should be separately studied, as they have different importance for professional orientation of young people.

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