Constructing careers: actor,agent, and author

When individuals seek career counseling, they have stories to tell about their working lives. The aim of career construction theory is to be comprehensive in encouraging employment counselors to listen for a client's career story from the perspectives of actor, agent, and author. Taking multiple perspectives on career stories enables counselors to offer clients a fitting intervention, whether it is vocational guidance for action, career education and coaching for agency, or career counseling to construct meaning.     

Women, Career Orientation, and Employment

This study examines age and life-cycle stage variance in women's career orientation (i.e., intention to pursue a career) and in the expression of career orientation through employment. The study group is a cross-sectional, non-probability sample of 1, 120 women, ages 22–64, who contacted a major mid-western university's Center for Continuing Education of Women. Three findings predominate: (1) Career orientation is negatively related to age, reflecting greater career interest among younger women. (2) In all marital and parental status categories, high proportions of young women are career oriented, suggesting that career interest persists through the periods of family formation and expansion. (3) The greatest discrepancy between career orientation and rate of full-time employment occurs among married mothers of preschool children, suggesting that career plans are deferred during early motherhood. Discussion focuses on the implications of the findings for work and family policy and further research.     

Career Stages in Australian Professional Women: A Test of Super's Model

This study empirically tested Super's career stage theory by examining whether differences in Australian professional women's attitudes toward work vary across the career life cycle. A number of career stage research criticisms relating to sample type, recycling issues, and career stage measurement were addressed. Hypotheses were tested via trend analyses providing support for the theoretical propositions in Super's career stage model. Results show that satisfaction with pay and job involvement were lowest in the exploration stage, women in the establishment stage were significantly more satisfied with pay and less willing to relocate for promotion compared to women in the exploration stage, while women in the maintenance stage were more committed to their profession and more involved in their careers than women in establishment and exploration stages. The research findings suggest that Super's career stage model is a useful framework for understanding women's career development.     

Mental health and well-being of black women: Toward strategies of empowerment

This review of the literature on Black women's mental health has three goals: 1) to describe the mental health issues, needs, and adaptive behaviors of Black women; 2) to discuss the research, intervention, and public policy efforts of mental health professionals and Black women's groups to address the multiple needs of this population; and 3) to identify effective strategies by which community psychologists can improve the mental health status of Black women through efforts to reduce their environmental stressors, to increase their resources and access to services, and to facilitate their empowerment in American society. The authors propose a number of recommendations to improve Black women's mental health, including changes in research paradigms, changes in education and training programs, and the development of culturally competent service delivery systems.     

Adding Career Biographies and Career Narratives to Career Interest Inventories

This study with 20 adults explored adding career biographies and career narrative writing to the career interest assessment report process. Participants reported that biographies and narratives helped them identify themes to consider how their career plans fit their personal lifestyle, meaning making, and values. This study offers 1 way to incorporate narratives and story to explore the self and self‐in‐context to activate meaning‐making processes in career interest assessment reports. Until career interest assessment reports include career biographies and a process for writing career narratives, only career counselors can offer this type of service to clients.     

Feminist Approaches to Social Science: Epistemological and Methodological Tenets

This paper is a primer for community psychologists on feminist research. Much like the field of community psychology, feminist scholarship is defined by its values and process. Informed by the political ideologies of the 1970s women's movement (liberal, radical, socialist feminism, and womanism), feminist scholars reinterpreted classic concepts in philosophy of science to create feminist epistemologies and methodologies. Feminist epistemologies, such as feminist empiricism, standpoint theory, and postmodernism, recognize women's lived experiences as legitimate sources of knowledge. Feminist methodologies attempt to eradicate sexist bias in research and find ways to capture women's voices that are consistent with feminist ideals. Practically, the process of feminist research is characterized by four primary features: (1) expanding methodologies to include both quantitative and qualitative methods, (2) connecting women for group-level data collection, (3) reducing the hierarchical relationship between researchers and their participants to facilitate trust and disclosure, and (4) recognizing and reflecting upon the emotionality of women's lives. Recommendations for how community psychologists can integrate feminist scholarship into their practice are discussed.     

Fostering networking behavior,career planning and optimism,and subjective career success: An intervention study

The present study evaluated personal resource-oriented interventions supporting the career development of young academics, working at German universities within the STEM fields. The study sought to foster subjective career success by improving networking behavior, career planning, and career optimism. The study involved a quasi-experimental pre-post intervention with two intervention and two control groups (N = 81 research associates). Participants of the first intervention group received networking training; participants of the second intervention group received the same networking training plus individual career coaching. Participants of both intervention groups were female. Participants of the control groups (i.e., male vs. female group) did not participate in any intervention. As expected, path analyses, based on mean differences from pre-test to post-test, revealed an increase in career planning and career optimism within the networking plus career coaching intervention group, that was indirectly positively related to changes in subjective career success. Contrary to our expectations, the networking group training alone and in combination with the career coaching showed no effectiveness in fostering networking behavior. Results are discussed in the context of career counseling and intervention effectiveness studies.     

Career assessment and creativity: potential complementarity or a contradiction in terms?

ABSTRACT

In this research we investigated whether creativity and career assessment are a contradiction in terms or whether, through creative thinking, their potential complementarity in career guidance and counselling can be realised. The research demonstrates the creative application of the systemic Integrative Structured Interview (ISI) for the Self-Directed Search (SDS) with a South African female mid-life career changer. Results indicated that the ISI positions clients as storytellers who create rich systemic stories about their quantitative SDS scores. The constructs of story telling are evident throughout an interview about quantitative scores; the scores become unifying themes across the stories. In sum, the ISI can assist mid-life career changers to make meaning of their career transition; and by embedding career assessment in a systemic story telling process creativity is evidenced as a multilayered process.     

Life Design Career Counselling with an Abandoned Adolescent: A Case Study

This article describes the value of life design counselling with an abandoned adolescent female. The participant was selected purposively from among a group of abandoned adolescent females who had expressed a need for career counselling. The life intervention comprised two 90-minute sessions per week over a period of a month. Life design data included collage, family constellation, life line, career style interview, asset map and life chapters. Following the intervention, the participant demonstrated career adaptability and an eagerness to take an active part in her evolving life story. Life design counselling has potential to meet the career counselling needs of children with neglect and abandonment experience.     

Career mapping for international students: A critical-constructivist approach

Despite rapidly increasing presence of international students seeking career guidance and opportunities in the United States, existing counseling literature offers limited perspectives on how counselors can support this community using strengths-based and culturally responsive approaches. Addressing this long-standing gap, we offer this conceptual scholarship discussing career mapping as a dialogical and critical-constructivist strategy for career counselors to help international students understand their life story, strengths, and barriers in the context of career development, and plan their actions accordingly. Implications for practice are also offered.     

Sex differences in achievement/career motivation of Iranian boys and girls

The relationships of early socialization, socioeconomic status (SES), religion, community discrimination, and community resources (all as possible predictor variables) to achievement/career motivation (the criterion variables) for 200 Iranian high school senior girls and boys were studied. Multiple regression analyses were performed to identify how much variance was accounted for by each predictor variable. In addition, a discriminant function analysis based on four linear combinations of the predictors for high and low SES, and for males and females, was performed to identify the best and strongest predictors. Through content analysis of the projective protocols representing achievement motivation, no significant achieving imagery was found for these Iranian subjects. The measure did, however, provoke imagery indicative of the subjects' preoccupation with marriage and/or affiliation with the opposite sex. Consistent with research findings in the United States, Iranian females scored lower in career motivation and expressed less belief in sex discriminatory myths than did males. The upper SES subjects of both sexes showed a higher level of career aspiration, and perceived more community resources for their careers, than did the lower SES groups. Sex, SES, community discrimination, and heterosexual interest contributed more heavily than the other predictors in predicting the variance of career motivation. Possible implications of the results for improving Iranian women's achievement/career motivation are discussed. A need for a more cross-culturally appropriate measure of achievement motivation is suggested.This study was supported, in part, by the University of Illinois Center for International and Comparative Studies. The author is indebted to Drs. Martin L. Maehr and Helen S. Farmer of the University of Illinois for their direction and advice in conducting this study.     

Life Design: A Paradigm for Career Intervention in the 21st Century

A new paradigm is implicit within the constructivist and narrative methods for career intervention that have emerged in the 21st century. This article makes that general pattern explicit by abstracting its key elements from the specific instances that substantiate the new conceptual model. The paradigm for life design interventions constructs career through small stories, reconstructs the stories into a life portrait, and coconstructs intentions that advance the career story into a new episode.     

The Mother–Daughter Relationship as a Resource for Korean Women's Career Aspirations

Korean college women's career aspirations were examined among 482 Korean college women in South Korea. The inability of women to envision themselves in a career has been largely attributed to formal education that perpetuates gender inequality. As such, this study investigated the inter-relationships between external factors (school experiences and peer influences) and internal factors (maternal influences with the mother–daughter relationship) in Korean women's development of self-perception and in the significance of their sex-role behaviors (career orientation and feminist identification). The structural equation model (SEM) utilized in this study revealed that Korean women's career orientation was determined directly by their nontraditional sex-role attitudes and by a close, continuous, and satisfactory relationship with their mothers. Overall, maternal influences on the development of daughters' career orientation outweigh other factors encountered in schools, and emerge as key predictor variables in Korean women's career development.     

Intrapsychic factors influencing career aspirations in college women

A 300-item questionnaire designed to assess the relationship and relative importance of several factors for women's career aspirations was answered by 169 female college juniors and seniors. Regression analyses showed that women with high career aspirations were satisfied with their lives; confident of their career plans; willing to postpone marriage; nontraditional in their values and behaviors; generally external in orientation, believing that discrimination is responsible for many of women's failures and that organized pressure rather than individual action is necessary to combat this discrimination; certain that women's demands for equality are justified and that most men agree with them; likely to have had a working mother who was perceived as being dissatisfied with her own life; and if planning to marry soon, endorsing dual role compatability. When all variables were considered simultaneously, attitudinal factors were found to best predict career aspirations, while socialization variables were relatively unimportant.This study was supported by funds from the University of California, Los Angeles, Personality and Social Psychology Training Grant, USPHS 1 T 1 MH 11, 696. The authors wish to express their thanks to the Women's Studies Program at UCLA for its continued cooperation. Also deserving of recognition for their help with early phases of this study are Cathy Connor, Jomary Hilliard, Paula Johnson, Karen Paige, Andrea Tyree, and Gail Zellman. Portions of this paper were presented at the University of California, Los Angeles, Symposium on Sex Roles and Sex Differences, Los Angeles, 1972.     

Concevoir et construire sa vie : un modèle général pour l’accompagnement en orientation au xxie siècle

The many constructivist and narrative methods for career intervention that have been developed in the last two decades share an implicit pattern of counseling. This pattern or paradigm can be made explicit by abstracting its key elements from each of the specific methods that express the new conceptual model. The paradigm for life design interventions constructs career through small stories, reconstructs the stories into a life portrait, and co-constructs intentions that advance the career story into a new episode.     

Awakening: Career Opportunities After the Storm

Immediately following natural disasters, basic needs are provided; however, the long‐term needs of individuals are neglected. The narrative approach (Brott, 2001; Cochran, 1997) to career counseling is offered as a method to assist survivors of natural disasters to tell their story and create new meaning related to their career paths.     

SOCIAL CLASS, SOCIAL CHANGE, AND GENDER

This article explores the implications of social class background in the lives of women who attended Radcliffe College in the late 1940s and in the early 1960s. Viewing social classes as "cultures" with implications for how individuals understand their worlds, we examined social class background and cohort differences in women's experiences at Radcliffe, their adult life patterns, their constructions of women's roles, and the influence of the women's movement in their lives. Results indicated that women from working-class backgrounds in both cohorts felt alienated at Radcliffe. Cohort differences, across social class, reflected broad social changes in women's roles in terms of the rates of divorce, childbearing, level of education, and career activity. There were few social class-specific social changes, but there were a number of social class differences among the women in the Class of 1964. These differences suggested that women from working-class backgrounds viewed women's marital role with some suspicion, whereas women from middle- and upper-class backgrounds had a more positive view. Perhaps for this reason, working-class women reported that the women's movement confirmed and supported their skeptical view of middle-class gender norms.     

Organisational Factors, Social Factors, and Women's Advancement

This study examines if organisation size and the degree to which the organisational hierarchy is male moderate the relationships between social factors (career and psychosocial functions of mentor support, and internal and external networks) and women's advancement in management. In all, 848 women in the Australian banking sector were surveyed. Results from moderator regression analyses found that, although male hierarchy does not moderate these relationships, the size of the organisation does. Specifically, career functions of mentor support and internal networks explain women's advancement more in small than in large banks. Recommendations for facilitating women's advancement in management are discussed.     

Achievement orientation,attainment values,and women's employment

This study examines age variance in the relationship of women's achievement needs and values to their participation in paid employment. The study group is a cross-sectional, nonprobability sample of 1120 women, ages 22–64, who contacted the Center for Continuing Education of Women at a major midwestern university. Three findings predominate: (1) Compared to general achievement orientation, the specific values attached to attainment through career and family are stronger predictors of employment status. (2) Degree of participation in paid employment is related positively to career values, and negatively to family values. (3) Career values, alone, are the best predictors of employment status among women aged 45–64, while a combination of career and family values best predicts employment among women aged 22–34 and 35–44. The findings suggest that women's labor force participation is partially a function of the interaction between career and family task demands and values.