Exploring bidirectional associations between social interactions and undergraduate STEM students' career motivation

Drawing from situated expectancy-value theory and the transactional model of development, the present study examined bidirectional associations between undergraduate STEM students' career motivation and interactions with three key socializers across a semester of college. We collected 13 weekly surveys ( N = 5224 responses) with 658 undergraduate students (average age = 19.02 years; 54.6% male, 44.8% female, 0.5% non-binary; 74.6% White, 19.9% Asian or Asian American, 7.8% Black or African American, 3.5% Latine, 2.9% Middle Eastern, 0.9% American Indian or Alaskan Native, 0.3% Pacific Islander) from the United States, asking them to report each week the quality of interactions with instructors, peers, and family members related to their career plans, and their career-related expectancies, values, and costs. Results from psychometric network analyses that allowed for within-person, temporal associations between variables indicated that interactions with peers and family members increased students' career expectancies, with positive family interactions also increasing career intrinsic and importance value, and positive instructor interactions (unexpectedly) decreasing students' career expectancies. Notably, we also found strong effects in the opposite direction: Students who initially had higher career-related expectancies and values or higher career-related costs reported later interactions with socializers about their career plans that served to confirm and/or enhance their positive or negative motivation. Overall, this study suggests that career plan development occurs through complex, dynamic, and bidirectional associations between the individual and their social environments across time, supporting central tenets of the transactional model of development and situated expectancy-value theory.