A multimethod examination of hope and adolescent STEM career expectancies

Abstract

Introduction: Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields are growing rapidly and understanding adolescent's interest and hope for pursuing a STEM career is essential for additional growth and opportunity collectively and individually. Hope is a cognitive–motivational construct that includes three components: hopeful future expectations (HFEs), intentional self‐regulation (ISR), and connection, and is associated with academic achievement and career pursuit; it has not been examined in relation to STEM. This study fills a gap in the literature by taking a multimethod approach to understanding the association between adolescents' hope and STEM career interests. Methods: Participants were 639 middle‐ and high‐school adolescents in the southwestern United States who quantitatively reported their hope and STEM career interests and provided qualitative descriptions of reasons for wanting to pursue a STEM career. Results: Quantitatively, HFEs significantly and positively predicted STEM career interest. Relations were examined by gender and school level. For middle‐school girls, ISR significantly predicted STEM career interest, for middle‐school boys and high‐school girls, HFEs positively significantly predicted STEM career interest, but results of high‐school boys were nonsignificant. Qualitatively, adolescents mentioned reasons aligning with HFEs and ISR as motivations for pursuing a STEM career, as well as prosocial motivations. Additionally, they discussed their interest in a STEM career as a way to pursue other goals such as financial stability. Discussion: Findings highlight the possibility of hope as a malleable motivation for STEM career pursuit. Our findings support the components of hope as a salient associate of early STEM career interest, with adolescents who have high HFEs and ISR being particularly apt to say they would like to pursue a STEM career. Our results support the active development of hope among US adolescents as a catalyst toward personal and global success.