The Different Roles of Help-Seeking Personalities in Social Support Group Activity on E-Portfolio for Career Development

Abstract

Social Support plays a crucial role between recipients and service providers. It is a strong contributor in reducing the level of uncertainty in a situation, in both relationships with one’s own self, as well as relationships on other levels. It can also be used within a group activity system such as E-Portfolio development. One example of this being the support provided to learners who have reflected on their own experience during a period of transition. However, it is possible that some of the learners who participated in the social support group activity may not have been familiar with the community and may have acted differently, changing their help-seeking style within the group. This research used Activity theory as a tool to define the activity structure and aimed to focus on the working behavior among members of a social support group with different help-seeking personalities. The experiment also revealed the effects of E-portfolio development on self-efficacy skills in career-based decision-making, based on different help-seeking personalities using Pretest–Posttest Nonequivalent Control Group design. Upper secondary school students in Thailand were used as the population in the research. Participants in this study were also students under Royal patronage in grade 11 (n = 80) and there were students from each region of Thailand. These participants attended the guidance and preparation summer camp in collaboration with Chulalongkorn University. It is revealed by the findings that the statistically significant difference is at the level of .05 in Autonomous help-seeking learners and within the subgroup 3, which included Autonomous and Dependent help-seeking learners. The help-seeking personality working styles in the support group are discussed.