Profiles of Future Expectations Among Urban Adolescents in Cambodia

Adolescents are tasked with navigating competing priorities, including whether to marry, have children, pursue a job/career, go to college, and contribute to society. The developmental task of building expectations for the future is especially complex for Cambodian adolescents living within a society that strongly prioritizes family obligations yet increasingly provides educational and professional opportunities. The current study, guided by Seginer’s (2003) future orientation model, applied latent profile analysis (LPA) to explore patterns of Cambodian adolescents’ (N = 580, 64% female, Mage = 15.85) future expectations across key life domains and predictors of those patterns. LPA identified four profiles: Low Expectancy (low expectations across all domains; 12%), Family Focused (high expectations to get married and have children; 31%), Professional/Service Focused (high expectations across education, employment, and societal contribution domains; 27%), and High Expectancy (high expectations across all domains; 30%). Females were more likely than males to be in the Professional/Service Focused than High Expectancy profile. Adolescents with greater internal locus of control and family obligation were less likely to be in the Low Expectancy and Family Focused than High Expectancy profile, whereas adolescents in higher grade levels were more likely to be in the Family Focused than High Expectancy profile. Adolescents with closer relationships with mothers were less likely to be in the Professional/Service Focused than High Expectancy profile; adolescents with closer relationships with fathers were more likely to be in the Professional/Service Focused than High and Low Expectancy profiles.