Factors affecting career choice a case study of Medical school students

Abstract

This study was conducted in Mulago, Kampala. The main objective of the study was to examine the factors affecting career choice using a case study of medical school students, Makerere University. Specifically, this study aimed at finding out whether personality traits of a student, background culture of a student, economic status of a student, family background of a student and a student’s self-efficacy have a relationship with the career choice of a student from medical school This study adopted a cross sectional survey research design using 278 medical students and graduates from Makerere University and quota sampling technique was applied in selecting the respondents who were included in the sample. The research findings indicated that 67% of the respondents were females while 33% were males, with mean age of 25 years having a standard deviation of 1.79 and range of 10 years. 82% of the respondents were currently practicing their field of training of medicine either as part time or full time and 51.4% indicated that they had no plans of changing their career, 25.2% had plans of changing their career whereas only 23.4% was not sure at the time of the survey. There was a relationship between personality and career choice of a students and students with a more positive personality were found to be more likely to stay in their selected career for long than those who had some negativity (p<0.05). There was also a relationship between economic status and career choice of students (p-value<0.05) and a unit increase in the economic status increases the chances of remaining in their career by 0.152 units. There was a relationship between self-efficacy of an individual and career choice (p-value<0.05) and career choice increases by 0.251 units when a student’s self-efficacy increases by one unit. However, this study revealed that there was no relationship between family and cultural factors and career choice of an individual (p-value>0.05). The study concluded that personality traits, economic status and self-efficacy had a relationship with career choice of a student whereas family and cultural background did not. This study recommended that the universities should put into consideration other factors like personality traits of an individual before admitting them on specific courses.