Relationship Between StrengthFinder Signature Themes and Academic Majors in an Urban Midwestern University

Abstract

Students often matriculate to higher education institutions without anunderstanding of what they want to major in or eventually select as a career. This cancreate difficulty in finding pathways to degree completion. Lack of focus can also createstrain on students and staff as the students work to choose academic majors and careers.This exploratory descriptive study described the first-time full-time students at a largepublic research university in the Midwest during the fall of 2016 and fall of 2017 throughthe lens of the Clifton StrengthsFinder (CSF) assessment. Members of each of the twofirst-time full-time cohorts were required to complete the CSF. Archival data thatcontained signature themes and academic major or exploratory area for each cohortmember were analyzed to determine differences between the signature strengths anddomains of students with a chosen major and those classified as exploratory track. Thetop five themes for students with declared majors in all academic schools were Achiever,Restorative, Futuristic, Competition, and Learner. The top five themes for studentscategorized as exploratory track were Adaptive, Restorative, Achiever, Empathy, andInput. A unique combination of signature strengths themes was observed withinindividual academic schools and each exploratory track. Only the Restorative signaturetheme appeared in every top five strengths list for each academic school and exploratorytrack. When looking at academic schools and exploratory tracks from a domainperspective, the Influencing domain was the least represented in all academic schools andexploratory tracks except the School of Business. Matches in the rank orders of domainswere observed between academic schools and exploratory tracks, but when examining thedistribution of the signature strengths there were not any matches that showed analignment between academic schools and exploratory tracks. Results from the current study point to the need for additional research that would provide more insight into therelationship between the CSF and academic choices of students.