Arab Educational Information Network

The study aimed at identifying the relationship between professional tendencies and some demographic and social variables among students of Thamar University according to the Holland's theory. To achieve this purpose, we used Holland's Occupational Orientation Scale (1985) which was arabicized and standardized by Wasfi Asfour (1997). It consisted of (36) items covering six dimensions of professional tendencies: real, analytical, social, commercial, traditional and artistic tendencies. The sample of the study consisted of (204) male and female students who were randomly selected from the students of first level at Thamar University. The results showed that the degree of approval of the scale as a whole was high and the degree of approval of all dimensions was high except the artistic tendencies which was a very high degree of approval. The results also showed that there are statistically significant differences between males and females in the overall score of the Occupational Orientation Scale and all its dimensions in favor of males. The results also showed that there were no statistically significant differences in the total score of the professional orientation scale and all its dimensions attributed to the two variables: specialization, father's education level. Some recommendations and research proposals were proposed according to these resuIts. (Published abstract)