Peer influences on career choice's cognitive of undergraduates

Abstract

Friends play an important role and could be examined as individuals who sharing, chatting and consulting in the daily life. No one deny the significance of friends, how can they experiences or enjoy their life by only themselves and lack of relationship outsides. More friends from various cultures and countries, more lesson and experiments we can attain, one of them is making decision based on advice of friends, who we trust and relatives to them. There are many previous studies about the peer influences on adolescence or teenager‟s behavior, even more drug abuse using. These studies believe that peer affected to childhood stage more than parents or siblings. Adolescents have tendency to copy behaviors of peer group who around them and spend more time with friends than parents and siblings, (Bookwizad, 2008). We have to tend becoming people who similar around us such as friends (peer), those significantly impact to our life and decisions. Therefore, peer influence is most powerful in adolescence, which is considered the connecting stage from childhood to adulthood and this assumption whether correct comparable to an adult. This study based on the peer influences model of Erikson (2005) which describes three main factors of peer have the most ability to affect on individual‟s behavior: peer pressure, peer modeling and acceptance seeking. The triangulation approach will be applied in this paper. Such merge of qualitative and quantitative methods will help approach more valuable data. In addition, using qualitative method also help modify the model fitting Vietnamese context better. There are still some limitations in this research.