The vocational maturity of Jamaican New Secondary school students

Abstract

This exploratory and descriptive study sought to utilize theory and methodology developed with adolescents in the United States (US) to investigate vocational maturity in Jamaican students. From a random sample of nine schools, two 9th and 12th grade classrooms were randomly selected, and the Crites' Attitude Scale of the Career Maturity Inventory was administered to a total of 1,074 New Secondary school students, representative of the population in urban, suburban, and rural areas of Jamaica. It was found that 11th graders were more vocationally mature than 9th graders; sex and geographic location did not appear to have any meaningful influence on vocational maturity, neither were there any interaction effects of the factors. For a number of items, the majority of Jamaican students gave the vocationally immature response, according to Crites' criteria. This appeared to be attributable to cultural differences between Jamaica and the US. It was concluded that the Attitude Scale was useful as a preliminary tool for the study of vocational maturity in Jamaican New Secondary school students. However, the factor structure identified in the study could provide the basis for the development of a vocational maturity measure that was more appropriate for these students