Journal of Vocational Behavior 23, 251-256 (1983)

Occupational Perceptions of Academic Disciplines

JOAN E. MCDONOUGH AND GRAHAM F. WAGSTAFF

Liverpool University

This study investigated the way in which various academic disciplines are viewed by students with respect to their “specificity,” i.e., the degree to which each is related to all occupations after graduation, and their “utility,” i.e., the extent to which each facilitates obtaining employment after graduation. A consensus concerning the specificity and utility of 17 academic disciplines was found for a sample of 485 sixteen- to eighteen-year-olds. This consensus was reliably dem- onstrated on other independent samples; nevertheless, some differences between individual disciplines were found as a function of sex and type of school attended.

Research on occupational choice has, whatever its theoretical orientation, tended to focus on the person choosing, rather than on the content of choice or the societally agreed meaning of that choice.

Thus there are considerable data on early childhood familial relationships and their relation, mediated by personality, on subsequent career choice (e.g., Roe, 1956, 1957), on personality traits (e.g., Cattell, Day & Meeland, 1956) or personality factors related to work environments (Holland 1973); vocational maturity, stressing the developmental nature of occupational choice (e.g., Super 1957, 1980; Tiedeman & O’Hara, 1963); sociologically oriented theories concerned with social class (e.g., Sewell, Haller & Straus, 1967); and decision-making theories (e.g., Janis & Mann, 1977).

Exceptions to this general orientation are the studies on the perceived social status of occupations (e.g., Liversidge 1962) and on the sex ste- reotyping of occupations (e.g., Albrecht 1976; Weinreich-Haste 1979; Gettys & Cann 1981; Shinar 1975).

The one study to make use of the notion of occupational specificity appears to be that by Vander-Well (1970); in this study, however, the specificity was operationally determined by three judges assigning dis- ciplines to two categories, representing specific choice orientations or general choice orientations. The judges were not similar to the subject

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252 MC DONOUGH AND WAGSTAFF

population in their characteristics, and no evidence is presented to indicate that the subjects shared their perceptions.

The other study concerned with perceptions of occupations and their incumbents is that by Bradley and Hutchings (1973) which confined itself to looking at concepts of science and of scientists as factors affecting subject choice in secondary schools.

Although there is now widespread agreement that occupational choice is best viewed as a developmental process (Blau, Gustad, Jessor, Parnes, & Wilcock, 1956; Ginzberg, Ginzburg, Axelrad, & Herma, 1951; Super, 1953), it is a process marked by crisis points at which firm decisions must be made, either positively or by default, and which commit the individual to a certain course of action. While this process is not irreversible, in general the costs associated with a significant change in direction are such as to render it impracticable for the majority.

One such major decision point occurs at the age of 17 or 18 when those individuals who have remained within the educational system must decide whether they intend to continue their education, and if so, whether at university, polytechnic, etc., where they wish to study, and which discipline(s) they wish to pursue. Making such decisions need not nec- essarily imply a firm occupational intention, but implicitly demonstrates that certain occupations have been, either intentionally or unintentionally, excluded from consideration.

It was felt that academic disciplines varied in the extent to which each was related to the occupation pursued after graduation (“specificity”) and also in the extent to which they facilitated obtaining employment of any sort after graduation (“utility”). Where a discipline is perceived as being highly specific to the subsequent occupation, the decision to enter that discipline implies an intention to enter the corresponding occupation; however, it was necessary to establish whether a consensus existed among undergraduate students and among sixth-formers as to the specificity of various disciplines, whether such perceptions of specificity were related to perceptions of utility, whether perceptions of both constructs were related to demographic factors, and the realism of perceptions of utility.

METHOD

Subjects. The subjects were 146 female and 339 male sixth-formers ages 16-18 years (these are equivalent to final-grade high school students in the United States.) They were drawn from 12 schools representing a cross section of the type of education available in the Wirral area of Merseyside; 93 males and 278 females went to single-sex schools, and 53 males and 61 females went to mixed, or coeducational schools.

Materials and procedure. All subjects were given a three-page ques- tionnaire. The first page listed 17 academic disciplines in alphabetical order. Subjects were required to rate the extent to which each discipline

OCCUPATIONAL PERCEPTIONS 253

was related to subsequent occupation for anyone studying it at university by circling “S” (highly specific) “I” (somewhat related) or “N” (no relationship). The second page required students to rate the same disciplines at a 3-point scale according to utility, i.e., how useful the discipline would be for obtaining employment. The third page asked for more general details including sex and type of school attended.

RESULTS

Overall and Subgroup Analyses

The specificity and utility ratings for each discipline were converted into an index form by a differential weighting the percentage of subjects assigning a discipline to each category, using the formula OSI/OUI = C 3(%S) + 2(%1) + l(%N), where OSI/OUI are the occupational specificity and utility indices (see Table 1). Responses for specificity and utility were homogeneous according to Kendall’s coefficient of concordance (p < .OOl in both cases). The correlation between the OS1 and OUI rankings was 0.82 (p < .005). The results were further analyzed using the SPSS package subprogram “Crosstabs,” which compares groups using the x2 statistic. Significant sex differences were found in the rated specificity of Architecture, which males perceived as more specific than did females, while pharmacy was perceived as more specific by females. Males perceived Architecture to be more useful (i.e., of higher utility) than did females,

TABLE 1 Occupational Specificity (OSI), Utility (OUI), and Probability of Employment (PE)

Scores for Various Academic Disciplines, with Rankings (r)

Architecture Biology Chemistry Commerce Computer science Engineering English Geography History History with politics Law Medicine Pharmacy Philosophy Physics Psychology Sociology

OS1 OUI

Score r Score r

278.1 4 218.2 10 195.9 11 220.1 9 204.4 8 244.0 5 196.5 10 222.5 8 249.8 6 264.0 2 259.4 5 263.9 3 141.5 17 172.4 13 162.4 14 167.6 14 154.5 16 147.7 16 171.8 13 167.0 15 278.3 3 243.9 6.5 283.5 1 269.8 1 278.9 2 248.9 4 160.9 15 143.4 17 200.6 9 243.9 6.5 210.3 7 174.0 12 176.9 12 211.5 11

PE

7% r

11.26 4 17.26 9 14.16 8 19.88 11

- - 10.71 3 22.04 14 13.93 7 19.98 12

- - 12.31 5 8.93 2 2.97 1

31.60 15 13.86 6 18.62 10 20.69 13

254 MC DONOUGH AND WAGSTAFF

whereas females considered Commerce and Sociology to be more useful (p < .05 in all cases). These differences were significant both for single- sex and coeducational schools. Only one consistent difference was found according to the type of school attended; subjects attending single-sex schools considered pharmacy to be of greater utility than did subjects attending coeducational schools. This difference was significant for both males and females (p < .05 in each case).

Generality of OSI and OUI Scales

In order to assess whether the OS1 and OUI scales were limited by sampling variables a questionnaire was administered to a further sample of sixth-formers (50 males and 52 females) attending a coeducational school in London. The correlations between the two samples for the OS1 and the OUI were 0.98 0, < .005) and 0.93 @ < .005), respectively. The correlation between the OS1 and the OUI for the London sample was 0.84 0, < .005). Part of the exercise was repeated on a sample of un- dergraduate students (57 male and 57 female) attending Liverpool University and studying various disciplines; however, only 14 disciplines were rated, Architecture, Medicine, and Pharmacy being excluded. The correlation between the original and the undergraduate samples based on the 14 disciplines was 0.92 (p < .005) for the OSI. Collectively these results would appear to indicate that the OS1 and OUI scales as indicated in Table 1 may have some generality, and are not simply limited to the Wirral Sample.

OSI, OUI, and Employment

In order to determine whether the OUI values as perceived by the Wirral sixth-formers related to the actual probability of employment, an analysis was performed using statistics provided by the University Grants Committee (UGC) concerning the destinations of university students graduating in 1978-1979. The numbers of students of 15 disciplines known to be unemployed, or failing to respond to inquiries were pooled to give an estimate of the number not in employment, and expressed as a per- centage of the graduates of that discipline. This enabled disciplines to be ranked in order of decreasing probability of employment (Table 1). The correlation between this and the OUI rankings also in Table 1 was 0.79 @ < .005) overall, 0.70 (p < .Ol) for females, 0.84 (p < .005) for males, indicating that perceptions of utility are significant predictors of the objective probability of obtaining employment after graduation.

(Note: UGC data were not available for the two remaining disciplines.)

DISCUSSION

The consensus regarding the specificity and utility of various disciplines appears to indicate that most students to elect to enter high specificity

OCCUPATIONAL PERCEPTIONS 255

disciplines are in effect operationalizing a concrete occupational choice, and are aware of this. This finding is consistent with that of Taylor (1979), who found that most final-year engineering students had effectively made the decision to be be engineers on entering university, and that their decision concerning the selection of jobs on leaving was primarily one of intraoccupational choice. Although the OS1 and OUI rankings correlated significantly together, the fact that the differences between sexes and school types for certain disciplines did not always occur on both scales suggests that the two scales may be conceptually different. The sex and school-type differences themselves do not appear to fit consistently into any single explanatory framework, and more work is obviously necessary in order to establish the determinants of these differences.

The significant relationship between perceived utility and the single measurement of the objective probability of gaining employment is en- couraging, but imperfect. It seems reasonable to assume that realistic perceptions are advantageous in the occupational decision-making process, and therefore that career education should devote some attention to the reduction of such subjective-objective discrepancies.

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Received: July 19, 1982.