Measuring adolescents’ perceived social competence in career education: A longitudinal study with Portuguese students

Abstract

Social competence is a multidimensional construct with an important role in adolescents´ career development. It allows the establishment of positive relations with adults and peers, the acquisition of information and feedback relevant to career exploration and decision-making, and it helps to cope with day-to-day challenges, by the adoption of positive social behaviors. This study aims to present and discuss the Portuguese adolescents´ perceptions about their social competence to deal with interpersonal situations in career education situations. Participants were 880 adolescents, 512 girls (58.2%) and 368 boys (41.8%), aged 11 to 20 years old (μ=14.40±1.49), attending the 8th (N=495), 10th (N=198), and 11th (N=187) grades, at elementary and secondary schools, in the northern, central and southern Portugal. Adolescents´ were administered the Perceived Social Competence in Career Scale (PSC-Car; Araújo, Teixeira, & Candeias, 2008), as part of a broader longitudinal project titled “Career and Citizenship: Personal and contextual conditions for ethical questioning of life-career projects”. PSC-Car is a self-report instrument which consists of six subscales related to perceived social competence in each of six hypothetical career education situations and two other subscales related with perceived poor or excellent performance and in all of those situations. PSC-Car was administered in three different assessment moments, with an intermission of six months each. Results indicate statistical significant differences in the double date situation subscale, when comparing the T1 and T2, and in the friend counselor situation, and in the poor performance subscales, when comparing the T1 and T2, and the T1 and T3 assessment moments. Statistical significant differences were also found in the double date situation´ subscales considering the 8th, 10th and 11th grades. No statistical significant differences were found considering boys and girls. Implications are discussed for the development of educational and career guidance and counseling interventions within scholar contexts.