Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT; Lent, Brown, & Hackett, 1994) is a well-researched social cognitive theory of vocational development that takes into account the influence of personal, social, and environmental variables. Previous SCCT research encompasses a variety of domains including Holland's (1997) RIASEC types and math and science, and includes samples across race/ethnicity. However, few studies have examined the theory for African American women or reported findings separately for this group, and no studies have included prestige as an interest dimension. An important limitation of the vocational psychology literature is that although prestige has been conceptualized as an important construct (e.g., Gottfredson 1981, 1996) there have been few theoretically-driven studies on prestige. A promising representation of vocational interests was proposed by Tracey and Rounds (1996a); this interest model locates prestige as orthogonal to the dimensions underlying the RIASEC types. In order to address the aforementioned limitations of the SCCT research, this dissertation examined SCCT on the prestige dimension as conceptualized by Tracey and Rounds with a sample of 198 African American university and college women.
A series of path analyses was conducted to test the hypothesized relations among the following variables: mother's occupational prestige, mother's educational prestige, prestige self-efficacy, prestige outcome expectations, prestige of vocational interests, and career choice prestige. Career choice prestige was assessed in two ways, using (1) an occupational consideration measure, and (2) prestige ratings of participants' reported occupational goal. The proposed models provided good fit to the data, and several of the SCCT hypotheses were supported. Across models, the hypothesized paths from mother's occupational prestige and mother's education level to prestige self-efficacy and prestige outcome expectations, and the hypothesized direct paths from prestige self-efficacy to prestige outcome expectations and prestige of choice goals were not supported. Interestingly, prestige outcome expectations emerged as a stronger predictor of prestige of choice goals than prestige self-efficacy and prestige of vocational interests. Overall, the findings provide support for integrating prestige as a domain of interests within SCCT. Future research is needed to further investigate the relative influence of self-efficacy, outcome expectations, and interests on career choice goals on the prestige dimension and across race/ethnicity and gender.