Assessing College Students' Satisfaction With Their Academic Majors
Abstract
A six-item measure of global satisfaction with one's major, the Academic Major Satisfaction Scale (AMSS), was developed and validated. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses suggested a unidimensional structure. The measure had high internal consistency and distinguished between students who remained in their majors versus those who changed majors during 1- and 2-year periods. AMSS scores were positively associated with career decision self-efficacy and negatively associated with career choice anxiety and generalized indecisiveness. AMSS scores were also associated with indices of socially desirable responding, but social desirability did not account for the relationships between major satisfaction and the career decision-making variables. Implications for theory and ideas for using the AMSS in research and practice are presented.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Five items adapted from the Academic Major Satisfaction Scale by Nauta (2007) measured career choice satisfaction with alpha = .92.
“Five items were adapted from the Academic Major Satisfaction Scale (AMSS) by Nauta (2007) to measure satisfaction with one's current career choice (α = .92).”
From Interest Fit Beyond the RIASEC: The Comprehensive Assessment of Basic Interests—O*NET (CABIN-NET) (2026) · cites this paper as Nauta (2007)
No citation lists for this paper
No citation lists for this paper yet — checked again daily.
References 52 · Cited by 238
- Authors
- Nauta, M. M.
- Affiliations
- Illinois State University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Nauta, Margaret M.
- ORCID
- Nauta, Margaret M.
- Venue
- Journal of Career Assessment
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2007-11
- Volume
- 15
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 446-462
- ISSN
- 1069-0727 (ISSN-L)
- 1552-4590
- OpenAlex
- W1975553882
- Cited by
- 238
- References
- 52
- Citations by year
- 2026: 15 · 2025: 15 · 2024: 21 · 2023: 12 · 2022: 24 · 2021: 14 · 2020: 21 · 2019: 17 · 2018: 19 · 2017: 14 · 2016: 15 · 2015: 17 · 2014: 8 · 2013: 7 · 2012: 6
- FWCI
- 7.31
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Journal of Career Assessment (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Safety Research › Career Development and Diversity
- Social Sciences › Education › Higher Education and Employability
- Social Sciences › Education › Higher Education Research Studies
- Keywords
- major satisfaction, university students, career decision-making self-efficacy, career choice anxiety, indecision, social desirability, major switching, scale development, career choice
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
