| Summary: | A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Arts at the University of Zululand, (South Africa), in fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts in Research Psychology degree, 2004. === The purpose of the study was to examine certain aspects of educational and occupational development in adolescent females. Specifically, the aims were: (1) to ascertain the nature of occupational aspirations of black adolescent girls, (2) to determine the relationship between black adolescents self esteem and occupational aspirations, and (3) to find out whether parents' level of education has an influence on black adolescents' occupational aspirations.
Subjects were 161 black girls, aged between 14 and 23 years, from two schools (one a private school and the other a government school) in the township of Atteridgeville, west of Pretoria. The overall results on the educational aspirations of this sample of adolescent girls indicated that these girls intend to graduate from, high school and achieve higher levels of education beyond high school. Occupational aspirations were assessed on the basis of their training requirements, on the first choice of occupation, which the students wanted more than the others; a majority of them aspired to occupations necessitating a degree.
The type of schooling did play a role in influencing occupational aspirations, it is thus important to acknowledge that socioeconomic factor is the important variable , since socioeconomic influences which children go to public schools and which go to private schools.
It was interesting to find that individual value for educational aspirations and social approval for educational aspirations were significantly related, and that the individual value for occupational aspirations and social approval for occupational aspirations were significant.
The t-test for equality of means showed that the government school girls were slightly higher than the private school girls on school ability, while the private school girls were significantly higher on occupational aspirations than the government school girls
|
|---|
