Child Saving and the Emergence of Vocational Psychology

Vocational psychology emerged at the beginning of the 20th in a context of social and political change known as the “progressive era.” A popular progressive theme was “child saving,” a movement that expressed concern for the physical, educational, emotional, and social well-being of children and adolescents. Vocational guidance was one manifestation of this and served as the foundation for the emergence first of vocational psychology and later of counseling psychology. The concern for and care of youth was gradually replaced by the professionalization of psychology that over time has changed the focus and direction of vocational psychology.     

The Opportunity Structure: Implications for Career Counseling

Traditional career counseling methods are based on the assumption that matching clients' interests, values, abilities, and aptitudes to a suitable occupation will result in opportunities for self-actualization and personal expression. However, vocational psychology tends to neglect a critical extra-individual factor: the nature of the opportunity structure. True career choice may be the experience of only a small proportion of clients. Vocational psychology has focused almost exclusively on individuals to the neglect of social, economic, and political realities.     

Strengthening Career Human Agency

Rooted in A. Bandura's (1982, 2001b) social cognitive theory, the notion of human agency has received considerable attention in vocational and career psychology for the last 2 decades, especially with the recent emergence of social constructivist thinking in the field. This article continues in the same direction. In reviewing the notion of human agency in the broad life‐career context, the article illustrates and highlights the constructivist philosophy of human intention and action that constitutes the conceptual foundation of career human agency. Implications for career counseling are discussed with suggestions for using and enhancing agentic functioning in individuals' life‐career development.     

Career Psychology: A Cultural Approach for India

This paper sets out to address an important aspect of human development, namely, the processes by which career choices are made. Highlighting the necessity of considering the unique cultural, social, and economic factors that influence career development in the Indian context, the paper presents the cultural preparation process model as a potential framework for the development of a career psychology for India. Data from the Work Orientations and Responses to Career Choices: Indian Regional Survey (WORCC-IRS) is presented to illustrate the model and to discuss occupational and career interests which are constructs that are central to career guidance. Data is provided to show that cultural factors such as parental approval and the attribution of prestige have a strong influence on the formation of occupational and career interests. The paper concludes with a discussion on the importance of creating a platform for the emergence of an Indian career psychology that integrates into its purview the diverse factors that influence career development in the Indian context.     

Culture and career psychology: A social constructionist perspective

This paper reflects on the need to re-examine cultural and cross-cultural psychology with a view to re-invigorating them and placing them at the center of discourse in career psychology. One perspective that can be employed to achieve these goals is social constructionism in that it questions the centrality of post-positivism in cultural and cross-cultural career psychology and shifts the focus to people in relationships. Emphasis is placed on understanding relationships in culture and recognizing that cultures are neither static nor independent variables but central to and embedded in career psychology. Social constructionist perspectives on cross-cultural counseling in career psychology and the development of indigenous career psychologies are discussed.     

Neglected aspects and truncated appraisals in vocational counseling: Interpreting the interest-efficacy association from a broader perspective: Comment on Armstrong and Vogel (2009)

Invited commentary on Armstrong and Vogel's (2009) article on interpreting the interest-efficacy association stimulated an appraisal from a broader perspective. Like empirical research, scale development, and theorizing emanating from social cognitive career theory (SCCT), their conclusion about the importance of assessing both interests and self-efficacy in applied settings and speculations about the developmental sequencing of these attributes need to be evaluated in the context of what decades of longitudinal research reveal are critical determinants of educational and vocational choice, performance after choice, and persistence. For our interventions to be effective and our theory development to be meaningful, we must ensure that innovative measures possess incremental validity relative to cognitive abilities and educational-vocational interests, which are already well established as salient predictors of long-term educational-vocational outcomes. Broader historical, philosophical, and scientific perspectives are provided to enhance practice, research, and theory development. These broader perspectives reveal how well-positioned vocational counseling is for further advances if it builds on (rather than neglects) its longstanding tradition of developing a cumulative psychological science.     

Occupational Wellness: The Integration of Career Identity and Personal Identity

Historically, career and vocational counseling have served as cornerstones to the counseling profession. Still, there are several survey studies that indicate that interest in career counseling among counseling professionals has eroded. Conversely, there has been an overwhelming response from counselors to the idea of wellness. The intent of this article is to encourage practicing counselors and researchers to consider career development as a key ingredient in the conceptualization of wellness. Furthermore, it is imperative that we begin to assist clients in achieving this aspect of occupational wellness through the integration of career identity and personal identity.     

Reinvigorating the Study of Careers

Before discussing how to innovate the study of career development using insights from life-span psychology and life course sociology, researchers might benefit from reconsidering whether they are studying careers or studying vocational behavior. While the word “career” seems ubiquitous in vocational psychology research, there are important differences between the study of vocational behavior, occupational roles, and career development. In this article, I urge researchers to (a) reconsider the meaning of career and research on career development, (b) adopt prospective, longitudinal research designs, and (c) concentrate first on processes of development and then on the content of careers. Considering these suggestions may ready vocational psychology for true innovations such as studying human development through work and relationships.     

Frank,We Hardly Knew Ye: The Very Personal Side of Frank Parsons

This article is a detailing of the limited information available regarding the personal life of Frank Parsons, who is credited with founding the career counseling specialization of modern day professional counseling as well as all professional counseling and the related fields of vocational psychology and counseling psychology in the early 1900s. This article presents information on Frank Parsons's physical appearance; character and personality; quirks, eccentricities, and prejudices; traumatic events in his life; and personal relationships and, in that context, a possible defined sexual orientation.     

Reason,Intuition, and Social Justice: Elaborating on Parsons's Career Decision‐Making Model

Nearly a century ago, Frank Parsons established the Vocation Bureau in Boston and spawned the development of the counseling profession. Elaborating on Parsons's socially responsible vision for counseling, the authors examine contemporary perspectives on career decision making that include both rational and alternative models and propose that these models be integrated. Returning to counseling's roots in early 20th century social and political reformation movements could ultimately lead the profession to a renewed vision that comprehends career decision making and counseling as a socially situated process entailing purposeful reasoning, prudent intuition, and sustained efforts at ameliorating social injustice.     

Vocational behavior and career development, 1983: A review

This article reviews the literature related to vocational behavior and career development published during 1983. Journals in the fields of psychology, sociology, and organizational behavior were examined, and 445 relevant articles published in 42 different journals were identified. The review is organized around issues pertinent to the counseling psychology perspective (i.e., career development, vocational choice, vocational behavior of women, assessment, intervention strategies) and the industrial/organizational psychology perspective (i.e., personnel functions, worker adjustment problems, work adjustment) on vocational behavior.     

Vocational behavior and career development, 1979: A review

Selected books and articles published in 1979 are summarized in this review of the literature on vocational behavior and career development. The articles are in journals representing the fields of vocational psychology, sociology, and organizational behavior. The topics covered include: perspectives on work; assessment measures; vocational aspirations-choice; job seeking and recruitment; occupational careers; motivations, needs, and goals; worker adjustment; work and the social structure; and interventions. The paper concludes with observations on literature trends and research needs.     

Professional Counseling in Romania: An Introduction

The formalization and professionalization processes in Romania resemble the early history of counseling in the United States, where development initially took place in the educational and career/vocational sectors. Brief accounts of the relationship between select periods in Romanian history and access to education and career/vocational support services are presented to provide a context for present‐day counseling activities. Information on the development of counseling in Romania, current practices, and future opportunities are presented as well.     

Personal Versus Vocational Focus in Career Counseling: A Retrospective Outcome Study

In this archival study the authors sought to determine the relationship, if any, between counseling outcomes and the topical focus in career counseling. Twenty-two counselors saw 46 adult clients at a community-based clinic for an average of eight sessions. Counseling outcome and topical focus (the extent to which the actual content of counseling sessions reflected relatively more vocationally or personally focused topics) were assessed from follow-up questionnaires to former career clients and from trained raters' evaluations of the counselors' written progress notes. Results showed that, from the counselors' perspective, outcomes were better when the focus of the sessions was relatively more vocational than personal and when relatively more interviews were held. Client satisfaction, on the other hand, was predictable only from the counselor's level of experience. Satisfaction with occupational status was not associated with any of the client, counselor, or treatment factors. Discussion focuses on the contribution of the results to career counseling practice and on the feasibility and validity of retrospective, archival research.     

Emotion: An Absent Presence in Career Theory

This article couples a review of some of the recent UK literature on careers and career interventions with arguments for greater attention to be given to the role of emotion in career development. In the United Kingdom, changes in the employment context have led career theory to become more concerned with understanding adult work-role transitions, and somewhat less emphasis is now given to initial occupational entry. Accordingly, the aims of career interventions have been extended to promote “career management” skills as well as career decision-making skills. It is argued that ideas from the literature on emotion can be employed to elaborate current notions of career management to take more account of the feelings and emotions underlying career transitions. In particular, examining sequences of cognition, affect, and behavior seems to be a promising way forward in further understanding changes to individuals' psychological contracts with their employing organizations. The literature on emotion generally and on emotional labor also has potential in understanding the dynamics of career counseling and in developing narrative approaches to counseling. An examination of the provision of career interventions in organizations shows how attending to the emotional dimensions of practice highlights some of the challenging political issues inherent in this context.     

Vocational choice: A decision making perspective

We propose a model of vocational choice that can be used for analyzing and guiding the decision processes underlying career and job choices. Our model is based on research in behavioral decision making (BDM), in particular the choice goals framework developed by Bettman, Luce, and Payne (1998). The basic model involves two major processes. First, the selection of a decision strategy according to four choice goals: maximizing decision accuracy, minimizing cognitive effort, minimizing negative emotion, and maximizing justifiability of the decision. Second, the construction of situation-specific preferences, which can reflect irrelevant task and context factors such as the evaluation mode. This basic model is extended to account for social influences and the long decision time typical of most career and job decisions. We review research on vocational choice in light of this model, discuss normative implications for counseling, and outline a research agenda for studying vocational choice from a behavioral decision making perspective.     

大学生职业成熟度研究述评

大学生处于职业发展的一个特殊阶段,职业成熟度是评价大学生职业心理发展水平的一把标尺。大学生职业成熟度理论基础主要有Super的职业终身发展观、Crites的职业成熟理论、Westbrook的认知职业成熟观和国内大学生职业成熟度七维模型。当前大学生职业成熟度已在人口学变量上进行了广泛的研究,今后的研究去向将更进一步呈现本土化趋势,采用质的研究和量的研究相结合的方法,就大学生职业成熟度与个体的认知、人格和情绪关系展开讨论。     

Convergent and Discriminant Validity of Five Interest Inventories

This study investigated whether interest inventories that purport to measure the same constructs actually yield scores that correspond. The study examined the empirical relation of scores for similarly and same-named scales on five widely used interest inventories: the Campbell Interest and Skills Survey, the Kuder Occupational Interest Survey-Form DD, the Self-Directed Search, the Strong Interest Inventory-Skills Confidence Edition, and the Revised Unisex Edition of the ACT Interest Inventory. Comparisons were made among scores for (a) vocational interests measured by homogeneous, rationally based scales; (b) occupational interests measured by heterogeneous, criterion-based scales; and (c) self-efficacy for RIASEC tasks. The participants consisted of 80 women and 38 men employed as career counseling practitioners and professors. Results from analyses of multitrait-multimethod matrices indicated that similarly and same-named scales correlated moderately and that, with few exceptions, these matched scales demonstrated convergent and discriminant validity. These conclusions were interpreted by distinguishing between the linguistic explication and operational definition of constructs in theories of vocational and occupational interests. The implications of these interpretations were considered for both the science of vocational psychology and the practice of career counseling. Future research should investigate both the profile validity and the interpretive validity of interest inventories that yield scale scores derived from different scaling strategies.     

Introduction: Constructivism and social constructionism in the career field

The impact of constructivism and social constructionism upon vocational psychology has often been through the use of the more generic “constructivism.” In this article constructivism is distinguished by its focus on how the individual cognitively engages in the construction of knowledge from social construction which claims that knowledge and meaning are historically and culturally constructed through social processes and action. The considerable ambiguity in the use of these terms is also discussed. Their contributions, challenges, and opportunities to the career field’s dominant discourses are examined: the dispositions discourse, the contextualizing discourse, the subjectivity and narrative discourse, and the process discourse. Broader challenges and opportunities for the field are also noted. The historical construction of knowledge, concern with language, action, and process problematize traditional understandings of career. They raise opportunities to question fundamental assumptions, focus on context, culture, the person-environment interaction, and practice.     

Le « sens de la vie » comme paradigme pour le conseil en orientation

Choosing a career requires the fundamental question of life meaning. If this issue was not treated in the career counseling research, his interest was reaffirmed by the development of new trends around life designing and positive psychology. This article discusses the various components (philosophical, theoretical and empirical psychology) of work on life meaning. It aims to demonstrate the usefulness and the unity of the concept for vocational guidance and model the theoretical principles. Finally, new directions are outlined in the design of new methods of guidance and researches.