Young Film and Television Professionals: The Impact of Gender on Career Decision Self-Efficacy

This work was quantitative, with gender as the independent variable and CDSE as the dependent variable. The author chose a non-experimental, cross-sectional research design, as gender was not altered during the study and the research question asked for the difference in CDSE between men and women. A survey provided data on age, gender, and CDSE. Simple random sampling allowed the author to randomly select 500 of the 4,761 members of Awesome Assistants, a Facebook group dedicated to supporting young film/TV professionals. To survey the selected members of Awesome Assistants, this study utilized the Career Decision Self-Efficacy Scale-Short Form (CDSES-SF).

The author contacted the selected participants via Facebook, LinkedIn, and email, with subjects that agreed to participate in the study being sent a Qualtrics link to the survey. Follow up messages were utilized over the four-week study, and the author also raffled off four $25 Amazon gift cards to drive up the response rate. After raw data was checked and uploaded into IBM Statistical Product and Service Solutions (SPSS) Statistics 27, the author eliminated subjects who did not answer the question about age, as well as those who were younger than 18 or older than 35. In addition, participants who failed to answer at least one question related to each of the five subscales within the CDSES-SF were also removed from analysis. As a result, the author analyzed 239 of the 267 individual responses. This study utilized an independent samples t test for gender (dichotomous independent) and the CDSES-SF overall score (continuous dependent) due to the variable types. Statistical significance was represented by a p-value below .05.