Constraint Satisfaction and Analogy Underlying Decision Making Strategies : High School Students Choosing a University

Abstract

When students make a decision about their future career, such as choosing a university or a job, they simultaneously consider multiple conflicting factors and balance the ideal and reality. The purpose of the present research was to examine factors that underlie high school students' decision making and the causal relations among those factors. A questionnaire survey of 359 high school students covered their goals for the future, motives for entering a university, constraints, analogy, and decision-making strategies. Factors for each topic were extracted by factor analysis. Next, in order to examine how high school students deal with constraints, decision-making strategies relating to selection of a university were composed by using a covariance structure model. From those decision-making strategies, 4 factors were extracted : complete strategy, multi-attribute decision making, constraint satisfaction, and goal satisfying. It was suggested that 2 types of decision processes, reflectivity type and impulsivity type, affected the relations among the 4 factors. In addition, analogy from personal experiences and "story" influenced multi-attribute decision making.