Abstract
Employment of college students is a hot issue of the whole society and livelihood issues, which is related to the future of students, the development of university education and social stability. Job search behavior is an important influence factor of employment, the more job search behavior, the greater the probability of successful employment. At present, the research on job search behavior at home and abroad mainly focuses on its structural measurement and predictive factors, and the objects of study are mostly ordinary groups, less involving special and disabled groups. Deaf college students gain more and more attention with the popularization of higher education and the development of special education in China. However, as a special group and vulnerable members of college students, deaf college students are easier to run into a stone wall in job search behavior. Therefore, it is of great practical significance to study job search behavior of deaf college students.
Locus of control is one of the most interesting concepts in personality studies and an important influencing factor of job search behavior, it consists of internal control and external control. Locus of control had a positive correlation with job search behavior. Internal control individuals believe that the outcomes of the events are controlled by themselves, and they will invest more time and energy in job searching than external control individuals who hold the view that the outcomes are controlled by external forces.
Career maturity is the core thought of career development, which can positively predict job search behavior. Generally speaking, the higher career maturity, the more job search behavior. In addition, locus of control has a positive correlation with career maturity. More concretely, the more internal control, the higher the career maturity, On the contrary, the more external control, the lower career maturity. That is to say, locus of control can impact career maturity and job search behavior, meanwhile, career maturity has a impact on job search behavior. Consequently,we can infer the predictive effect of locus of control on job search behavior is not entirely direct, but needs to be achieved through some intermediate variables, career maturity may be one of the important mediating variables. Based on this, we hypothesized that career maturity played a meditation role between locus of control and job search behavior.
To test the hypotheses, we adopted the method of convenient sampling to investigate 386 deaf college students from four universities in Chongqing, Beijing, Jilin and Tianjin by using the locus of control questionnaire, career maturity scale and job search behavior questionnaires. All the data was analyzed with the software SPSS 19.0 and PROCESS. The Bootstrap method was used to analyze the mediating roles of career maturity.
The results were showed as follows: (1) internal control had a significantly positive correlations with career maturity (p <.05) and job search behavior (p <.01). (2) career maturity played a partial mediating role between internal control and job search behavior. (3) the influence of career maturity between locus of control and job search behavior was a suppressing effect. Finally, we discussed the value, shortcomings and future research directions of this study.
Key words
internal control /
external control /
career maturity /
job search behavior /
deaf college students
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The Effects of Locus of Control on Job Search Behavior of Deaf College Students: Mediating Role of Career Maturity[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2019, 42(5): 1209-1216
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