Depression among Adolescents in Relation to their Career Decision-Making

Depression is a serious problem that impacts every aspect of a teen's life. It's impossible to isolate one single factor as the cause of depression. Rather, it likely results from a combination of many factors such as loneliness, lack of social support from family, peers, neighbours etc. Some other factors such as career in decision which means when an individual chooses inappropriate career, also makes the individual depressed. Pressure from the family for academic performance or to choose career or subjects according to the parents' interest, also makes individual more depressed. The present study was attempted to find relationship between depression and career decision-making (career decidedness and career indecision) among adolescents. For this 176 students studying in Government Senior Secondary Schools of Una district in class XI were selected. The Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II; Beck, Steer & Brown, 1996) and Career Decision-Making Inventory (CDMI; Singh, 1999) were administered to students. The results of present study showed that there was a significant negative relationship exists between depression and career decidedness and a significant positive relationship exists between depression and career indecision. These correlations showed that depression was significantly correlated with career decision-making. Also, the results of present study showed significant gender difference on the variables of depression and career decision-making (career decidedness and career indecision). This showed that girls were more depressed as compared to boys. Boys were more decided about career and girls showed more indecision for career choice. Also for stream differences, the results of present study showed that there was a significant difference exists on the variables of depression and career decidedness between science, arts, and commerce stream students but no significant difference exists on the variable of career indecision between science, arts, and commerce stream students. This showed that arts and commerce students were more depressed than science students and arts students were more depressed than commerce students. Also,results showed that science students were more decided about career than arts and commerce students but commerce students were more decided about career than arts students.