Déterminants sociocognitifs et choix des filières des beaux-arts le cas des étudiants des universités d’État au Cameroun

Abstract

This work is interested in the motivational mecanisms behind the choice of art series by university students. Choosing to study art in a precarious artistic environment where it is hard to live from one’s talent, where piracy is gaining more and more ground and where the rights of artists are not respected, is often considered as foolish. Adding to that, other facts that motivated the choice of this topic are: highly expensive products in the artistic milieu, people succeeding in the domain without having gone through a training school and the fact that studying art does not open to civil service. The question that backs up this study is : Is the choice to do art series by students from state universities determined by socio-cognitive factors? Interest here is to eshtablish a link between the choice of art series by those students and the formation of significant interests. Does this choice stem from some experiences ? From social persuasion? Bandura’s (1986) social cognitive theory was used to formulate the following hypothesis : there is a significant relationship between socio-cognitive factors and the choice of art courses. Through a skeletic approach, individual interviews were conducted; these helped to build a questionnaire following Likert’s model. Data were collected from 325 students from some art schools :Nkongsamba, Foumban, Maroua ; and from an accidental sampling made up of students from art series in the University of Yaounde I. These data were collected and analysed using Bravais-Pearson ®’s correlation test and at a critical point of $equal to 0.01 or 0.05 following each case Over the five hypotheses formulated, three were confirmed. Results show that 89.1% of students have great expectations for their results, 55.7% rely more on their social persuasion, 54.5% show great interest in art courses. Moreover, the relationships between the formation of interests and the choice to do art series (r = 007 ; p< 0.01), between social persuasion and the choice to study art (r =,018 ; p< 0.05), between results’ expectations and the choice to study art (r = 012 p< 0.05) are significant. In brief, results show that the formation of interests, social persuasion and results’ expectations better predict the choice of art series. This confirm the first hypothesis of this work that stated that sociocognitive factors can explain the choice to do art series. Some recommendations were made to authorities, teachers, university students and parents.