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In this study, we examined the effects of the mother-daughter relationship on the career self-efficacy of 394 female Taiwanese college students, including feelings of attachment and psychological separation. Through hierarchical regression analysis, the mother-daughter attachment relationship was found to separately and significantly facilitate predictions of career self-efficacy at the first level. The predictivity of the added psychological separation variable on career self-efficacy at the second level also reached significance after controlling for the mother-daughter attachment relationship. Additionally, the communication of the attachment relationship and the functional independence and conflictual independence of psychological separation were significant predictors. This suggests that people who a) communicate well with their mothers and who are able to manage personal matters without help from mothers, or b) have conflictual relationships with their mothers that lead to negative emotions, have better career self-efficacy.
Keywords: career self-efficacy, mother-daughter relationship, attachment, psychological separation.
Career self-efficacy is an individual's degree of confidence about solving issues related to future career planning; Hackett and Betz (1981), who referenced Bandura's (1977) self-efficacy theory, proposed this idea. Betz and Hackett (1997) organized 15 years of relevant literature and meta-analyses and confirmed that career self-efficacy could be used to effectively predict the selection of education and subsequent career, academic performance, and whether people adhere to their selected career choice. Hackett and Betz also stated that career self-efficacy theory could be used to explain differences between men and women in terms of their career development, given that career self-efficacy is a product of socialization and learning experiences. In the past, female career development has been suppressed and discouraged across the world, leading to low self-efficacy in women in some career fields (Betz & Hackett, 1997). In particular, one's family has been found to be the origin of individual socialization; interactions with parents are key factors for development and are one of the crucial sources that shape career self-efficacy (Ferry, Fouad, & Smith, 2000; Wolfe & Betz, 2004).
Career development theories in the 20th century have been focused on personal autonomy in making choices, and influencing factors from the environment have not been taken into account (Bluestein, 2011). The exposition of career development over the past decade has been affected by relationship contexts, and the influences of support from others for...