SELF-EFFICACY, ACADEMIC PERSISTENCE, PERFORMANCE RELATED TO CAREER DECISION DIFFICULTIES OF FIRST-YEAR STUDENTS

The present study aims to investigate the relationship between self-efficacy, career performance and persistence, and career decision difficulties, on a sample of first year students majoring in Communication Science and Public Relations, from Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. As a pilot study (N=30), one of the main objectives was to validate the scales used and to test if self-efficacy and academic success (academic performance and academic presentence) seem to be correlated with the decision difficulties of freshman students, as show in the present literature. All the scales used had the reliability index close above 0.8. Our findings show that self-efficacy is not correlated to academic success, but it is correlated with the career decision measurements. Because the literature we reviewed for the present study is mostly Western, we can assume that the discrepancy between our findings and others came from the specify of the Romanian context, as the economic and social factors have been show in literature to influence the final outcomes. In the same time, as expected, academic persistence is correlated with professional persistence, and also with the lack of information regarding the career decision process (about the process, about the self, about occupations, and about how to access additional sources of information). (C) 2018 Published by Future Academy www.FutureAcademy.org.UK