2014 Volume 17 Issue 2 Pages 162-174
Many previous studies have noted the significance of social support for students preparing for university entrance examinations. Another conceivable possibility is that within counseling practice, such support intended to reduce career decision-making stress could actually create psychological burdens on the students. Thus, semi-structured interviews were conducted with high school students preparing for university entrance examinations to investigate their tendencies toward career indecision and clarify the relationship between social support and mental turmoil in their career decision-making processes. The results revealed that social support encouraged decision-making by way of a stress-buffering effect in some cases, but it also clearly indicated that when coinciding with an underdeveloped career-path consciousness and a lack of experience in making career-related decisions, such support did not include problem-focused coping strategies that help these decisions. Furthermore, despite the intentions to evasively or temporarily deal with psychological burdens arising from the social support through repeated internalization or externalization, it was revealed that this emotion-focused coping led to the exacerbation of psychological burdens rather than appropriately addressing them. Furthermore, the findings indicated that the mental turmoil associated with such career decision-making included a cyclical structure in which the internalization and externalization of psychological burdens were repeated, which ultimately weakened the stress-buffering effects of such social support for career decisions.