Dong Xie, Assistant Professor in UCA’s Department of Psychology and Counseling, recently presented a paper titled “The Cross-Cultural Reliability and Validity of Career Perspective Inventory (CPI)” at the 2007 National Association of Career Development (NCDA) conference in Seattle, Washington. Supported by a UCA summer research stipend and a URC grant, Xie’s research examined the reliability and validity of the Career Perspective Inventory (CPI) on a dataset of 200 Chinese college students and 200 Chinese high school students in Mainland China. The results indicated that the structure of career development constructs may be different across different cultures and some of the constructs common to the Western cultures may not be valid constructs for the Chinese students. The research also provided directions for further revision of CPI in order to make it a cross-culturally reliable and valid career assessment tool which can measure the cultural influence on career development in both practice of career counseling and research in career development.
Xie also published a paper entitled “Buffering or Strengthening: The Moderating Effect of Self-Efficacy on Stressor-Strain Relationship” in the Journal of Career Assessment. The study suggested that the self-efficacy may buffer or strengthen a stressor-strain relationship depending how participants interpret the discrepancy between their self-efficacy beliefs and their actual performance in a stressful working environment. This study makes a contribution to the field by linking the self-efficacy theory to the cognitive dissonance theory.
