Unready, unwilling, or unable? An instrument development study of the antecedents of educational and vocational indecision in underprepared and prepared college freshmen

This research focuses on the development and validation of an instrument, the Adapted Scale of Educational and Vocational Indecision (ASEVI), which compares the antecedents of educational and vocational indecision between academically underprepared and academically prepared college freshmen at Purdue University Calumet. An effort has been made to create an instrument whose items provide operational definitions for Gordon\u27s (1984) three types of undecided students: the unready, the unable, and the unwilling, as well as to distinguish an undecided student from an indecisive one. Examination of students\u27 scores on the ASEVI involved conducting item analysis, testing hypotheses about the relationship of scores obtained on the instrument with measures of variables previously found to be related to undecidedness, examining the factor structure of the instrument, and evaluating the internal consistency of the items. Reasons for major and career undecidedness were self-reported by the underprepared and the prepared undecided students on the instrument. The results of this study testing the Adapted Scale of Educational and Vocational Indecision confirm the presence of four distinct factors, or types of indecision: unready, unwilling, unable, and indecisive. Factor analyses and Pearson correlation data support the content validity of the instrument. Cronbach\u27s alpha coefficient scores confirm the instrument\u27s reliability and internal consistency among the items that loaded significantly on each factor. “Underprepared undecided” students were found to be more likely to be categorized as unable. However, these underprepared undecided students were not more likely to be categorized as indecisive . Regarding the “prepared undecided” students, t-test results indicated that they were no more likely to be either unready or unwilling than were the underprepared undecided students. Correlation scores between selected subscales of the VDMD and VDS were significant confirming the concurrent validity of the ASEVI