Development and Validation of the Future Career Insecurity Scale (FCIS) in Law Students

TL;DR

This study created a new scale to measure career insecurity in law students, capturing anxiety, self-doubt, and uncertainty.

Contribution

The Future Career Insecurity Scale (FCIS) is a novel, multidimensional tool validated for Chinese law students.

Findings

The FCIS has three factors: Future Career Uncertainty, Self-Doubt, and Anxiety.

The FCIS showed good internal consistency and convergent validity with depression, anxiety, and stress measures.

Abstract

The transition from university to the workforce is a major developmental milestone that can generate significant psychological distress, especially for students in high-stakes professional programs such as law. Traditional measures of career-related anxiety often overlook the multidimensional nature of career insecurity and its culturally specific expressions. This study aimed to develop and validate the Future Career Insecurity Scale (FCIS), a novel instrument capturing three interrelated dimensions (future career anxiety, self-doubt, and uncertainty) among Chinese undergraduate law students. A two-study design was used with independent samples (N = 447 and N = 432). Study 1 applied exploratory factor analysis to identify the underlying structure of the FCIS. Study 2 conducted confirmatory factor analysis to validate the model and assess convergent validity using the measures of depression, anxiety, and stress. EFA supported a three-factor solution: Future Career Uncertainty, Self-Doubt, and Anxiety. CFA indicated good fit for a correlated three-factor model with satisfactory internal consistency (Cronbach’s α = 0.82–0.87). Convergent validity was evidenced by positive correlations between FCIS scores and DASS-21 depression, anxiety, and stress subscales. These findings indicate that the FCIS is a brief, multidimensional, and psychometrically robust measure of future-oriented career distress in legal education. Use of the FCIS can provide a brief, theory-aligned measure of future-oriented career distress in legal education and can support screening, targeted referral, and the evaluation of behaviorally informed interventions in university settings.

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