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Examples of Successful Proposals

Investigating Career Development From Childhood to Early Adulthood

Identifying Information

Lead Investigators:

Spencer G. Niles, D.Ed.
Professor of Education (Counselor Education Programs)

Jerry Trusty, Ph.D.
Associate Professor (Counselor Education Programs)

Collaborating Investigators:

Fred Vondracek
Associate Dean, College of Health and Human Development

Erik Porfeli M.S.
Doctoral candidate, Human Development and Family Studies

V. Scott Solberg, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Counseling Psychology Program, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Paul J. Hartung, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Behavioral Sciences, Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine

Abstract

The major purpose of this study is to gain greater understanding of the career development process for young people. The initial goal is a five-year study. However, to provide answers to critical questions (e.g., completion of postsecondary education, workforce entry and occupational stability) continuation past five years is necessary, and this is also the researchers' goal. To address the complex and multifaceted processes associated with the career development of young people through childhood and adolescence to adulthood, a complex and multifaceted design will be used. Using the developmental-contextual model (DCM) (Vondracek, Lerner, & Schulenberg, 1986), augmented and delineated by Developmental Systems theory (DST) and the Living Systems Framework (LSF) (Ford, 1987; Ford & Lerner, 1992), the overarching design, or meta-design, is necessarily a longitudinal-panel design. Comprehensive models will be generated and tested to examine the developmental processes that result in vocational identity, educational and vocational choices, and career development. Specification of the structure of analysis models will be based on the theoretical formulations of these theoretical models.

Specific Aims and Objectives

1. We will conduct a longitudinal study to identify factors influencing the career development processes of children and adolescents. We define career development broadly and assume that career development for the study participants includes career-related perceptions, educational and vocational choices, completion of secondary and postsecondary education, productive leisure behavior, workforce entry, career satisfaction, and occupational stability.
2. We seek to gain an awareness and functional understanding of the world of work in the lives of children (e.g., their awareness of work, career-related exploratory behavior, their consideration of work options) and adolescents.
3. We will also investigate the important transitions of children and adolescents (i.e., from elementary school to middle school, from middle to high school, from high school to postsecondary experiences). We seek to understand the relations among transition experiences and career development progress.
4. By investigating the intraindividual and contextual factors related to career development we seek to provide important information to career development theorists and practitioners generally, as well as to K-12 school personnel (i.e., teachers, school counselors, school psychologists, administrators) concerned with constructing curricular, co-curricular, and extra-curricular experiences that enhance the educational and career development of children and adolescents.

Background, Rationale, and Description of Methods Background

Understanding how career development unfolds over time provides important information for helping children and adolescents advance in their educational/career planning and achievement. Identifying personal influences (e.g., aptitude, interests, self-perceptions) and situational influences (e.g., communities, families, schools, social networks) that enhance or impede development has important educational, societal, economic, and personal implications. When children and adolescents are exposed to environmental conditions that impede their educational and career development, they often loose interest in school, develop low self-efficacy, lack a sense of hopefulness regarding their future opportunities, and engage in more negative behaviors (e.g., sexual activity, drug use, poorer school attendance) than students who are exposed to environmental conditions that foster career development (Herr & Cramer, 1996). Children with positive self-perceptions are positioned to engage in the exploratory behavior required to make sound educational and occupational plans (Super, Starishevsky, Martin, & Jordaan, 1963). When adolescents engage in exploratory behavior they are able to clarify their self-concepts and make appropriate connections between themselves and educational and vocational options. Thus, by identifying factors that foster development, school personnel, community members, and family members will be better able to contribute positively to the educational planning and career development of children and adolescents.

Theoretical Rationale

A developmental-contextual model of career development from middle childhood through early adulthood is presented in Figure 1. The model can guide researchers in investigating how a child moves through and employs a variety of contexts to develop a vocational awareness and orientation, to construct a career plan, and to eventually seek and enter the world of work. Although the model explicitly emphasizes the importance of specific contexts like school and family and the wider role of the sociocultural context, social and educational policy, and current economic conditions, it also allows for the inclusion of other specific contexts (e.g., nonprofit and faith-based community organizations) that may be important in one's educational and career development. Moreover, the model can accommodate rapidly changing and emerging influences like the role of technology in everyday life and its impact on the ever-changing occupational landscape. All of the aforementioned contexts are embedded within and affected by larger community and societal-level factors like the sociocultural context, governmental policy, and current economic conditions and trends.

Figure 1: A Developmental-Contextual Model of Career Development

Explanation of Figure 1:

Child: This circle represents both the developing child embedded in multiple contexts like the family (permeable (dashed) green circle), peers, and school and it represents the child as a self-constructing living system. Take notice of the two bolded arrows and the fainter arrow connecting the child to the child's extra-familial network, the adult, and the adult's extra-familial network respectively. For ease of presentation, these arrows represent all possible connections between the child and the sub-contexts that lie within the child and adult extra-familial network. The bolder arrows represent relationships that are presumed to be stronger than the fainter arrow.

The child extra-familial network: This permeable context includes aspects like school, peers, part-time work, and other community affiliations like church and community service organizations. The overlapping circles in the model suggests that the sub-contexts have shared and independent aspects as in the case of a child who has friends that do and do not attend the same school as sh/e. The arrow connecting this context to the developing person suggests that these contextual factors affect the magnitude and direction of the developing child and they affect the relationship between the child and the child as an adult.

The developing person: This arrow represents the child (red circle) moving through adolescence (the green portion of the arrow) and into adulthood (the blue circle).

Adult: This circle represents the child as an adult embedded within a network of family, romantic, and adult-as-parent relationships.

The adult extra-familial network: This context represents the adult social context outside of the home. When the child becomes an adult, they enter and become members of this context. The child's parental figures are also members of this context. The arrow connecting this context to the developing person suggests that these contextual factors affect the magnitude and direction of the developing child and they affect the relationship between the child and the child as an adult.

Developmental Systems Theory (DST) (Ford & Lerner, 1992) combines Lerner's developmental-contextual meta-model (Lerner, 1985) with Ford's Living Systems Framework (LSF) (Ford, 1987) to arrive at a comprehensive view of human development. LSF provides a comprehensive and general model for biological, cognitive, affective, and psychological functioning in the human living system. DST, by combining a developmental-contextual meta-model and the detailed process descriptions of the LSF, provides a view of the role of context, person-level functioning, and the dynamic relationships between the two, to explain person and group-level differences. The developmental-contextual model begins with the context and demonstrates how variability across contexts explains variability in human functioning and development. Conversely, LSF begins with person-level process and behavior and seeks to explain how these contribute to between-person differences. DST builds on the strengths of both approaches by providing a framework that can conceptually guide a program of research that aims to approach the question of career development as an exchange between the self-constructing person and a complex array of challenging, supporting, and inspiring contexts.

Description of Methods

The meta-design

Using the developmental-contextual model, augmented and delineated by DST and the LSF, the overarching design, or meta-design, is necessarily a longitudinal-panel design. Comprehensive models will be generated and tested to examine the developmental processes that result in vocational identity, educational and vocational choices, and career development.

Sub-designs and sub-samples

Within the meta-design and entire sample there will be various sub-designs and sub-samples. For example, recent research (Trusty, 2000; Trusty & Harris, 1999) has shown that student expectations for postsecondary educational achievement change across adolescence. These changes are affected by contextual variables differently, depending on whether students were higher or lower achievers early in their academic careers. Therefore, sub-samples of initial higher achievers and lower achievers are necessary to understand these developmental processes.

Sub-samples and sub-designs will be used to study other specific segments of the population. For example, studies (e.g., Hanson, 1994; Trusty et al., 2000) have shown that longitudinal career development processes differ for women and men. That is, the early variables that influence later outcomes and the nature of influences differ by gender. Therefore, to understand these processes, sub-samples of women and men will be examined. Processes may also differ for other groups (e.g., socioeconomic status, race-ethnicity), and sub-samples will be used to address research questions for specific groups.

Some sub-designs will be purely repeated-measures designs. For example, Eccles (1994), through a longitudinal study, has identified subjective task values as having a strong influence on the educational and vocational choices of women and men. Through tracking the development of subjective task values from Grade 5 through high school and beyond, our study has potential to substantially increase knowledge in this area. There are additional gaps in the literature regarding how particular phenomena develop or change over time (e.g., help-seeking behavior, self-estimates of ability).

Sub-samples, mainly cross-sectional sub-samples, will be used to develop and refine measurement methods. For example, there are few reliable measures for quantifying the career-exploration behavior of children. In addition, in a study as comprehensive as this, short yet reliable and valid measures are needed so as to not overburden participants; and some measures will need to be refined or developed.

In addition to longitudinal, quantitative methods, qualitative research methods are useful for studying processes (McMillan & Schumacher, 2001). Therefore, there will be qualitative components of the study; and for these components, sub-samples will be used. For example, verbal data from focus groups or interviews may be used in developing measures, identifying career-related influences, confirming quantitative results, and giving insight into complex processes. Therefore, to some extent, the design is an emergent design. That is, knowledge gleaned from qualitative (or quantitative) data will be used to adjust or focus components of the study as it progresses over the five-year period (Gall, Borg, & Gall, 1996). For the proposed study, qualitative data should be a rich source of information for assessing the influences of contexts (e.g., sociocultural, sociopolitical) represented in the outer band of the oval in Figure 1.

Participants

Three sites will be used for data collection. One site will encompass a primarily rural area in Pennsylvania (Pennsylvania State University). Another will encompass the urban, suburban, and rural areas in and around Birmingham, Alabama (University of Alabama at Birmingham). The third site will produce data from urban participants in the Milwaukee, Wisconsin area (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee). The researchers have enlisted the collaboration of interested and capable individuals in those areas.

Preliminary plans are as follows: In Year 1 of the proposed five-year study, young people and their parents will be sampled from Grades 5, 8, 10, and 12. These grade-levels coincide with or are adjacent to important transitions and career-related decision points in young people's lives. In year 3 of the study (two years later), students will be surveyed in the First Follow-up. This will involve students in Grades 10, 12, and students two years beyond high school (if their progression has been typical). In Year 4, students who were originally in Grade 5 will be surveyed (now Grade 8). The Second Follow-up will occur in Year 5, when all students in the panel sample will be surveyed. If progression is typical, participants will be in Grades 9 and 12, and 2 and 4 years beyond high school. It is hoped that extension of the study will allow following all participants in the original sample until they are 5 years beyond high school. Freshening of the sample will be done when attrition exceeds 10% of the original panel sample at any point. Therefore, if attrition becomes a problem, some components of the design may evolve into a longitudinal-cohort design (trend analyses).

Relevance to the CYFC

This project addresses the career development of children and adolescents from a developmental-contextual perspective. The study encompasses factors such as academic achievement, part-time work experiences, school involvement, peer influence, and family influence as these variables relate to career development. The project findings have the potential to contribute to knowledge regarding (a) educational curricula for elementary, secondary, and postsecondary education; (b) career counseling interventions for young people, (c) counseling-based, family-based, and community-based programming for promoting career development; and (d) refinement of career development theory.

Anticipated Outcomes

Work performed with the help of support generated through the present proposal will be the basis for a grant proposal aimed at governmental funding streams like NIH and NICHD and private foundations like the Grant Foundation. It is anticipated that the following outcomes will emerge:

1. Preparation of a comprehensive proposal for funding of a multi-site longitudinal study of career development in childhood and early adolescence, including
   1. recruitment of a nationally prominent scientific advisory board that will provide advice on all aspects of the planned five-year study;
   2. development of collaborative relationships (when not already existing) with pertinent schools at the multiple study sites;
   3. preliminary selection and pilot testing of measurement instruments.
2. Presentations at national and international meetings.
3. Publications highlighting the implications of the project's findings for career development theory and practice applied to children and adolescents from diverse groups.

Timeline

Research team members will convene at University Park in May, 2002. The initial draft of the research design and prospectus will be prepared by June 30, 2002 and shared with advisory board members for their review and feedback. Visits to the research sites will occur between October 1 and November 1, 2002. Pilot testing of data collection procedures will occur between December 1, 2002 and February 1, 2003. The investigators will convene in University Park in March 2003. The final draft of the research designs and grant proposal will be completed by May 1, 2003 and submitted for funding consideration.

Personnel

Spencer Niles, Jerry Trusty, and Fred Vondracek will coordinate the project. All three are longstanding career development researchers. A doctoral student in Human Development, Erik Porfeli, will assist. Site managers V. Scott Solberg, Paul J. Hartung, and Michale Windel will supervise the data collection at the research sites. An advisory board will be formed to provide advice and consultation to the researchers throughout the project.

Funding with Justification

Niles, Trusty, and Vondracek will contribute their time to the project; Vondracek will contribute wages equivalent to a 1/4-time assistantship stipend for a graduate assistant. The Department of Counselor Education, Counseling Psychology, and Rehabilitation Services will contribute staff assistant support and expenses related to copying.

The total funding request is $19,465 and is distributed as follows:

• $3,465 for graduate student assistant wages
• $3,000 to bring the external research team to University Park to engage in collaborative planning related to additional project design and implementation issues
• $4,000 for the Penn State research team to visit the research sites (Milwaukee and Birmingham) and to meet with K-12 school personnel involved in the project
• $1,000 to provide a small honorarium to 4 advisory board members ($250 per).
• $6,000 to conduct a pilot of the data collection instruments and procedures for elementary, middle, and high school students
• $1,000 for the PSU team to visit potential funding sources in Washington, D. C.
• $1,000 to purchase assessment materials to be used in data collection

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