ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Educ.
Sec. Higher Education
Who Struggles to Decide? Personality, Gender, and Career Indecision in Higher Education
Provisionally accepted
- 1Prince Sultan University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
- 2King's College London, London, United Kingdom
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Career indecision slows progress through university and into work, yet evidence from Middle Eastern settings remains limited. We surveyed 153 Saudi undergraduates across seven programmes and modelled a 12-item Career Decision-Making Difficulties composite against gender and Big Five traits. Gender showed no association with indecision. In multiple regression, extraversion was positively related to indecision, openness trended negative without reaching significance, and conscientiousness showed no reliable effect; overall explained variance was small with R² = 0.075. First year and final year students did not differ significantly. These results indicate that binary gender contrasts add little explanatory power in this context, that approach-oriented traits offer only modest leverage when indecision is treated as a single composite, and that year of study does not, on its own, account for uncertainty. Future work in the region should move beyond composites towards domain-specific difficulty profiles and longitudinal designs to capture change over time.
Keywords: career indecision, personality traits, gender, Students, higher education
Received: 02 Sep 2025; Accepted: 29 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Alotaibi, Almusharraf and Jasser. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Turkiah Alotaibi, turkiah_saad.alotaibi@kcl.ac.uk
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