{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,9,30]],"date-time":"2026-09-30T04:33:14Z","timestamp":1790742794646,"version":"4.1.0"},"reference-count":57,"publisher":"Frontiers Media SA","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,2]],"date-time":"2026-03-02T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1772409600000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"content-domain":{"domain":["frontiersin.org"],"crossmark-restriction":true},"short-container-title":["Front. Psychol."],"abstract":"<jats:sec>\n                    <jats:title>Introduction<\/jats:title>\n                    <jats:p>Graduate employability is increasingly emphasized in higher education, yet how students from low-income families develop employability remains under-theorized, particularly regarding the interplay between psychological resources and contextual constraints.<\/jats:p>\n                  <\/jats:sec>\n                  <jats:sec>\n                    <jats:title>Methods<\/jats:title>\n                    <jats:p>Using reflexive thematic analysis, we analyzed semi-structured interviews with 11 university students from low-income families to examine perceived influences and mechanisms underlying employability development.<\/jats:p>\n                  <\/jats:sec>\n                  <jats:sec>\n                    <jats:title>Results<\/jats:title>\n                    <jats:p>Nineteen sub-themes converged into four higher-order themes: psychological capital, resource-compensatory proactivity, goal clarity, and capability enactment. Self-efficacy and optimism energized proactive behaviors that sharpened career goals. Goal clarity then prompted deliberate practice that strengthened learning and self-management, resilience, and socio-communicative skills. These processes unfolded within family and university contexts, including economic constraint, prestige-based stratification, teachers\u2019 guidance, seniors\u2019 experience transfer, extracurricular participation, and internship and part-time work, which operated as filters or scaffolds. Mastery experiences further fed back to reinforce self-efficacy and optimism.<\/jats:p>\n                  <\/jats:sec>\n                  <jats:sec>\n                    <jats:title>Conclusion<\/jats:title>\n                    <jats:p>The resulting conceptual model localizes Social Cognitive Career Theory to a low-socioeconomic-status setting and suggests that strengthening psychological resources and engineering opportunity structures are jointly necessary for translating motivation into demonstrable employability.<\/jats:p>\n                  <\/jats:sec>","DOI":"10.3389\/fpsyg.2026.1718245","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,2]],"date-time":"2026-03-02T06:32:43Z","timestamp":1772433163000},"update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3389\/crossmark-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":3,"title":["Refining the employability of university students from low-income families: a qualitative study on the influential factors and mechanism of employability"],"prefix":"10.3389","volume":"17","author":[{"given":"Dan","family":"Wang","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"College of Education Science, Jilin Normal University","place":["Siping, Jilin, China"]}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Bohan","family":"Liu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Institute of Education, University College London","place":["London, United Kingdom"]}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Yujie","family":"Duan","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"College of Education Science, Jilin Normal University","place":["Siping, Jilin, China"]}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Yue","family":"Liang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"College of Education Science, Jilin Normal University","place":["Siping, Jilin, China"]}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Di","family":"Wu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"College of Education Science, Jilin Normal University","place":["Siping, Jilin, China"]}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Dan","family":"Zhang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"College of Education Science, Jilin Normal University","place":["Siping, Jilin, China"]}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Chao","family":"Song","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Psychology, Nanjing Normal University","place":["Nanjing, Jiangsu, China"]}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"1965","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,2]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"36","DOI":"10.17576\/geo-2020-1601-04","article-title":"The employability skills among students of public higher education institutions in Malaysia","volume":"16","author":"Abd Majid","year":"2020","journal-title":"Geogr. 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