The relationships among career maturity, motivation, and self‐regulation: A longitudinal study

Abstract In this study, we used data from the 2013 Korea Education Longitudinal Study to identify longitudinal relationships among motivation, self‐regulation, and career maturity in Korean elementary, middle, and high school students. Data from three waves were used for autoregressive cross‐lagged modeling—wave 2 (12 years old; sixth graders in elementary school), wave 5 (15 years old; ninth graders in middle school), and wave 7 (17 years old; 11th graders in high school). The results were as follows. First, the autoregressive effect was significant at all time points for all latent variables. Second, the cross‐lagged effect displayed the same direction across all time points, but different results were derived for different variables. The implications of the study are discussed.