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Assessing Postsecondary Barriers For Rural Appalachian High School Students, Melinda Gibbons, Anna Taylor, Emily Brown, Stephanie Daniels, Erin Hardin, Sam Manring

Education Sciences and Professional Programs Faculty Works

Social cognitive career theory indicates that perceived barriers negatively affect career and educational self-efficacy beliefs and may also impact interests, goals, and actions. However, measurement of barriers has produced mixed results, and few quantitative studies explore the perceived barriers of rural Appalachian students. In this series of studies, we explored the perceived educational and career barriers of rural Appalachian high school students. Our goal was to identify perceived barriers, but as initial results were analyzed, we then shifted to how best to measure barriers and how culture impacted the reporting of barriers by rural Appalachian students. The results of our …