Developing a short form of career development self-efficacy inventory (S-CD-SEI) for students with disabilities in Hong Kong

The Career Development Self-Efficacy Inventory aims to assess students’ competences in career planning and meeting personal career development needs. Although a large scale of survey using the 24-item of Career Development Self-Efficacy Inventory (CD-SEI) has been developed and validated in over 6000 Chinese adolescents in Hong Kong, researchers took a special focus on regular students. Considerably little is known of psychometrics properties of this inventory in students with disabilities. To provide researchers and educators useful instruments to understand career planning and career development needs of students with disabilities, the present study tested a short form of CD-SEI (15 items) in Hong Kong secondary 3 to secondary 6 students with disabilities (N =103). The 15 items consisted of five key domains to assess students’ career development self-efficacy: Career Planning, Career Goal Setting, Training Selection, Job Hunt Preparation, and Job Hunting. The results showed an overall estimate of the reliability of the 15-item CD-SEI is .96. Estimates of the reliability for all five domains (ranging from α = .78 to α =.86) are also good and satisfactory. A series of confirmatory factor analysis were also performed to generate a deeper understanding of the internal structure of this short inventory. This study would be the first to validate and test the usefulness of a short form of CD-SEI across eight types of special educational needs students. The results are discussed in relation to practical implications to not only assess perceived career development self-efficacy of students with disabilities, but also develop productive career guidance programmes/activities to cater for career development needs of this group of students.