Does Differentiation of Self Matter In University Students' Career Exploration?: Focused on Hospitality Majored Student

The employment rate has become the standard for university values. This raises the need to investigate the antecedents of university students' career exploration. Focused on the hospitality majored students, this study aims to investigate both individual and relational factors that influence their career exploration behaviors. Differentiation of self has been chosen as the individual and the relational antecedents based on Bowen's theory. It was investigated whether each dimension(I-position, emotional reactivity, fusion with others, and emotional cutoff) explains the amount of self-exploration and the amount of environmental exploration. The university students majoring in hospitality were surveyed and a total of 269 cases out of 300 cases were analyzed employing descriptive statistics and multi-variate analysis of variance, and structural equation modeling(SEM). The study found that I-position positively influenced self-exploration and environmental exploration. Emotional reactivity made an influence on environmental exploration, while it failed to explain self-exploration. Fusion with others and emotional cutoff also significantly influenced environmental exploration, however, it didn't make any significant influence on self-exploration. This study implies that the college of hospitality majors needs to understand that differentiation of self forms through family relationship and needs to provide the students the programs of how to understand themselves and what to do for their career exploration.