The Female-Headed Household Empowerment based on Social-Cognitive Career Counseling and its Impact on Promoting their Career Self-Efficacy and Future Orientation

The purpose of this study was to examine the female-headed household empowerment based on social-cognitive career counseling and its impact on promoting their career self-efficacy and future orientation (time perspective, anticipation of future consequences, planning ahead). This quasi-experimental research had a pretest-posttest control group follow-up design. The statistical population of the study was comprised of female-headed households in Karaj supported by Imam Khomeini’s Relief Foundation. Forty female-headed households were selected through random simple sampling method and were assigned to experimental and control groups. The instruments included the Career Decision Self-Efficacy scale (CDSES, Taylor & Betz, 1983) and the Future Orientation Scale (Steinberg et al., 2009). The experimental group went through a ten-session course on social-cognitive career counseling and the control group did not receive any intervention.  At the end of the intervention, career self-efficacy and future orientation were measured during posttest and follow-up phases and the data were analyzed via repeated measures ANOVA. Results indicated that the level of career self-efficacy and the future orientation of the participants in the empowerment training course was significantly higher than that of the control group (P<0.01). These changes were also observed in the follow-up stage. Accordingly, it is suggested that empowerment based on social-cognitive career counseling be used as an optimal psycho-educational package for promoting career self-efficacy and future orientation among female-headed households.