Challenges to the Career Development of Urban Racial and Ethnic Minority Youth: Implications for Vocational Intervention

Urban racial and ethnic minority youth experience a variety of internal and external challenges to their career development. This article discusses several potential barriers to successful career attainment experienced by racial and ethnic minority youth and identifies a series of recommendations that vocational counselors may wish to consider in addressing the career development needs of this population.     

Neoliberalism,Black Masculinity,and Black Male Youth: The Value Of Transdisciplinary Studies To Urban Educators

Drawing on Critical Race Theory and a transdisciplinary framework, this article considers how hegemonic neoliberal discourses contribute to and reinforce negative constructions of Black masculinity and the implications for educating Black male youth (BMY). Neoliberal secondary educational reforms of the last three decades in Ontario, which have resulted in heightened standardization in schools and promote norms of individual attainment, competition, and social control, have served to intensify the stigmatization and alienation BMY. In response to the interlocking racial, gendered, and class oppression they experience within the prevailing neoliberal context, many BMY have increasingly embraced a defensively situated resistant Black masculinity. We argue that, rather than viewing the communities and counternarratives of BMY as sites of deficiency, educators need to conceptualize the experiential knowledge of such young people as that which can nourish transdisciplinary knowledge production and be integrated into classroom curricula and pedagogy. Inviting the cultural wealth of BMY into school can help bridge the divide between schools and the communities of such youth, thereby making mainstream schooling more inclusive by diversifying curricula, democratizing the classroom, and challenging the neoliberalization of education. The authors highlight Hip-Hop as an example of cultural wealth that illuminates the knowledge and lived realities of BMY and can be utilized by urban educators to promote academic engagement and intercultural exchange in classrooms.     

Black Women's Career Aspirations

A 2-page questionnaire dealing with career aspirations and expectations was administered to undergraduates at four institutions, of which two were women's colleges and two were universities. Results suggest that Black women as a group predict that they will be earning less than Black males; white women as a group predict that they will be earning less than white men but the pay gap is narrower. While some employers may believe that Black women enjoy a special advantage in the job market, students who are Black and female do not, it seems, share that optimism.     

Career Development of Black South African Adolescents: A Developmental-Contextual Perspective

South Africa is undergoing rapid change in a post-apartheid era. This article uses the developmental-contextual perspective to examine the extent to which contextual and individual factors dynamically interact in the career development of Black South African adolescents. Furthermore, interventions that may assist in the career development of Black adolescents, as well as the implications of this research for counselors, are provided.     

Career Aspiration in Black College Women

No abstract available for this article.     

Developing a Career Counseling Intervention Program for Foster Youth

Former foster youth often experience difficulty finding and maintaining employment as they emancipate from state care. Research highlights this fact by consistently reporting on the bleak employment outcomes of former foster youth; however, virtually no studies have given practical guidance to practitioners on how to develop interventions. This article addresses this gap in the literature by providing practitioners with a detailed outline of a career counseling group intervention program for foster youth. A brief review of the literature informing this intervention program is also presented.     

Understanding the Behavioral Determinants of Mental Health Service Use by Urban, Under-Resourced Black Youth: Adolescent and Caregiver Perspectives

Black adolescents with mental health problems are less likely than non-Black adolescents with mental health problems to receive treatment, primarily for non-financial reasons including negative perceptions of services and providers, and self-stigma associated with experiencing mental health problems. To better understand these obstacles, 16 adolescents and 11 caregivers, recruited from two K-8th grade elementary-middle schools, participated in four focus groups guided by the unified theory of behavior to explore mental health help-seeking behaviors and perceptions of mental health services. In the focus groups, caregivers acknowledged more positive attitudes about seeking mental health services than adolescents, but both expected the experience of actually doing so to be negative. Adolescents and caregivers also acknowledged social norms that inhibit their mental health help-seeking. Therefore, we conclude that interventions targeting expectancies and social norms might increase the connection of urban, under-resourced Black adolescents and their families to mental health services, and be particularly important given the long-term consequences of untreated mental health problems for this group.     

Urban Career Women and Stress in Southeast Asia

A theoretical and conceptual review of stressors facing urban career women in southeast Asian countries is presented within a chronological age-bracket framework. Similarities and distinguishing differences from findings in the United States, Europe, and Australia are discussed. Younger attractive women were more likely to encounter sexual harassment and be taken less seriously at work. In the middle years, family demands with young children pose more of a distraction for the women. Southeast Asian career women have an edge compared to their Western counterparts in better access to support for household duties and child-minding from live-in maids and parents. However, they are expected to care for elderly parents and be responsible for efficient home management. In higher management appointments, they face similar stressors in critical perceptions of their authority and leadership by both men and women subordinates. Management initiatives to inculcate attitude change and transparency in addressing convoluted and irrelevant gender-role expectations can yield substantial organizational benefits.     

Education and Career Aspirations of Palestinian and U.S. Youth

Abstract

Belief in free will or determinism is related to attitudes toward punishment and to locus of control. The relationships remain ambiguous, however, perhaps because the belief has been viewed historically as a unidimensional construct. The responses of 507 American undergraduates to a free will-determinism questionnaire established the existence of two types of deterministic belief—psychosocial and religious-philosophical—and a separate, independent belief in libertarianism. Beliefs about punishment were multidimensional, consisting of attitudes toward punitiveness and rehabilitation. Respondents with higher scores on psychosocial or religious-philosophical determinism or libertarianism were more punitive than those with lower scores. High scores on either type of determinism were associated with more external locus of control scores. Respondents who rated the free will-determinism items for themselves and those who rated them for people in general differed on a number of dependent measures.     

Career Development and Public Policy

The rationale for policy interest in career development services and the way in which this rationale is being strengthened by the current transformations in work and career are discussed. The potential roles of public policy in relation to career development services are explored, along with ways in which such services can influence the policy‐making process. A range of policy issues related to making career development services available to all throughout life are identified. Stronger structures and processes are needed to bring together career development practitioners with policy makers and other stakeholder interests in order to address tasks of common concern.     

Psychological Empowerment Among Urban Youth: Measurement Model and Associations with Youth Outcomes

Empowerment‐based strategies have become widely used method to address health inequities and promote social change. Few researchers, however, have tested theoretical models of empowerment, including multidimensional, higher‐order models. We test empirically a multidimensional, higher‐order model of psychological empowerment (PE), guided by Zimmerman's conceptual framework including three components of PE: intrapersonal, interactional, and behavioral. We also investigate if PE is associated with positive and negative outcomes among youth. The sample included 367 middle school youth aged 11–16 (M = 12.71; SD = 0.91); 60% female, 32% (n = 117) white youth, 46% (n = 170) African‐American youth, and 22% (n = 80) identifying as mixed race, Asian‐American, Latino, Native American, or other ethnic/racial group; schools reported 61–75% free/reduced lunch students. Our results indicated that each of the latent factors for the three PE components demonstrate a good fit with the data. Our results also indicated that these components loaded on to a higher‐order PE factor (X² = 32.68; df: 22; p = .07; RMSEA: 0.04; 95% CI: .00, .06; CFI: 0.99). We found that the second‐order PE factor was negatively associated with aggressive behavior and positively associated with prosocial engagement. Our results suggest that empowerment‐focused programs would benefit from incorporating components addressing how youth think about themselves in relation to their social contexts (intrapersonal), understanding social and material resources needed to achieve specific goals (interactional), and actions taken to influence outcomes (behavioral). Our results also suggest that integrating the three components and promoting PE may help increase likelihood of positive behaviors (e.g., prosocial involvement); we did not find an association between PE and aggressive behavior. Implications and future directions for empowerment research are discussed.