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Weekly UpdatesIn 1987, 208 second graders were interviewed about their occupational aspirations and expectations, school likes and dislikes, educational plans, and other variables. They were reinterviewed every 2 years through senior year in high school. A5-year post-high school follow-up was conducted, and 35 young adults (23 years old) from the original sample completed a detailed questionnaire. Young adults reported significantly less career direction and preparation in high school than they did as seniors in high school. Comparisons between 3 generations within the same families were conducted on educational and occupational achievement. The importance of teachers and parents in children's career development is discussed.
The process of career development has been discussed and researched for decades, with early formal attempts documented by Ginzberg, Ginsburg, Axelrad, and Herma (1951); Super (1957, 1980); and others. Historically, Super (1957, 1980) provided the most thorough and cutting-edge concepts at the time, with his conceptualization that career development was a process and not a discrete point in time. Super's (Super & Over-street, 1960) Career Pattern Study, a longitudinal examination that began with ninth-grade boys, was an attempt to validate vocational development tasks that formed the basis of vocational maturity. Although Super (Super & Overstreet, 1960) found that many ninth-grade boys were not vocationally mature, there seemed to be a relationship between level of maturity and success in young adulthood (Zunker, 2002). In analyzing the data gathered over the years with this small sample of men, Savickas (2003) identified the strong role that personality exerts on choice of occupation by turning each individual's struggles and preoccupations into his or her occupation.
Over the years, other attempts to explain career development as a process appeared. For example, Vondracek and Schulenberg (1986) described a developmental-contextual approach for understanding career development. They argued for a dynamic interaction between pertinent individual characteristics, such as cognitive attributes and behavioral style, with contextual factors that contributed to an individual's career development. Vondracek and Schulenberg (1986) encouraged career counselors to address the whole person while being sensitive to "norma tive, age-graded influences . . .; normative, history-graded influences ...; and nonnormative, life-event influences" (pp. 250-251). Their emphasis on the whole person and nonnormative influences is reflected today by constructivism, one current approach in career counseling that focuses on personal stories and the historical events and experiences in the individual's life (Savickas, 2002).
Gottfredson's (1981,1996) stage development theory focuses on a few critical individual concepts and perceptions and attempts to explain how and why individuals make the career choices they do. By 6 to 8 years of age (Stage 2), children become sensitive to the roles individuals have in the home and society. Men and women take on different roles, and children can see this sex role differentiation extended to the world of work. Consequently, boys and girls in this age range are likely to pick occupations for themselves that match their sex. Older children, from 9 to 13 years of age (Stage 3), tune in to social valuation in their lives as reflected in the home, in school, with friends, and in the community. Furthermore, children at Stage 3 become aware that occupations carry a different social status and value, and depending on other individual and cultural factors, they are apt to select higher rather lower social value occupations when asked to do so. Individuals 14 years and older (Stage 4) are more apt to know and appreciate their own internal aptitudes, traits, and characteristics and thus choose occupations relevant to these attributes. In occupational selection, they are less swayed by the sex or social status of the job.
The purpose of this longitudinal study was to examine how several career development concepts changed for students from 2nd to 12th grade and into adulthood. Additionally, a number of theoretical concepts espoused by Gottfredson (1981, 1996) and Holland (1997) were tested.
Method
Original Sample
A longitudinal study of the career development of 208 second graders in four elementary schools in a Denver suburb began in 1987. Parents of these 7-year-olds had given permission for their children to be involved in this long-term analysis. This sample comprised approximately 60% of all possible second graders in four contiguous elementary schools located in a middle-class neighborhood in the large Jefferson County School District. Approximately 86% of the students in the sample were White, and Hispanic Americans composed the majority of the remaining non-White students. The school district administrative office characterized the geographic neighborhood as stable with a mix of working-class and professional families in owner-occupied homes.
Information gathered from parents when the children were in the second grade revealed that mothers' and fathers' mean ages were 34.1 (SD = 4.58) and 36.1 (SD = 6.07) years, respectively. The education levels of parents were 13.4 (SD = 1.88) and 13.6 (SD = 2.49) years for mothers and fathers, respectively, which means that they completed education, on average, at the halfway point of their sophomore year in college. Ninety percent of fathers and 60% of mothers reported full-time or part-time employment. Part-time employment data were not available. Forty-three percent of the employed parents had jobs defined as professional, technical, and managerial according to the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT; U.S. Department of Labor, 1991a).
Data Collection
Using a structured interview form called "Survey of Interests and Plans" (SIP), I and graduate students who had been instructed in the use of the SIP conducted interviews. The original sample group of elementary students was reinterviewed in the 4th, 6th, 8th, 10th, and 12th grades. In the 8th grade, the students were enrolled in several middle schools, and as 10th and 12th graders, they were enrolled in several high schools. In later grades, additional data collection was conducted in the form of standardized inventories (e.g., Career Factors Inventory [Chartrand & Robbins, 1997] in 12th grade), although many of the structured interview questions remained the same for the 10 years the students were interviewed.
Summary of Results
A number of concepts from the career development theories of Gottfredson (1981, 1996) and Holland (1997) were tested and supported (Helwig, 2001, 2003). For example, consistent with Gottfredson's (1981, 1996) stage theory, boys in second and fourth grade strongly preferred masculine occupations (e.g., engineer, pilot, doctor), whereas girls generally preferred feminine occupations (e.g., teacher, nurse, retail worker). In sixth and eighth grade (11 and 13 years of age), boys still overwhelmingly preferred masculine occupations, but girls were switching significantly away from feminine occupations to masculine ones. The masculine occupations these children of both sexes were selecting (e.g., doctor, scientist, engineer, astronaut) carried much more social value than did feminine occupations, and at these ages girls were opting for the higher social status occupations as predicted by Gottfredson's (1981, 1996) theory. Beginning at the senior high school level (18 years of age), there was a discernible shift for many students away from high social value occupations to a more mixed set of occupations. This trend, although appearing somewhat later than Gottfredson's (1981, 1996) theory predicted, may have been evidence of older students choosing occupations more in tune with their own personal characteristics and abilities.
Older children in this study decreased the gap between occupational aspirations and occupational expectations over the years. Boys, who always reported more fantasy occupations as their aspiration than did girls, moderated occupational aspirations to more realistic possibilities with age. Boys also moderated their annual salary expectations from middle school through the high school years. These trends were consistent with Super's (Super & Overstreet, 1960) view of the increase in vocational maturity that leads to wiser career choices, in part, because of the increase in perceived career salience, the importance of the work role vis-a-vis other roles (Creed & Patton), 2003; Savickas, 2001). (For a summary of the principal findings of the first 10 years of this study, see Helwig, 2004.)
Follow-Up Sample
Five years after the participants' graduation from high school, a contact card was sent to the last known address (parental home) of all 103 students who completed the study in the 12th grade. There was no way to determine how many of the postcards were received by the study participants. Following additional mailings and e-mail communications, 35 completed questionnaires were returned and were usable.
The data being reported here are based on this sample of 35 individuals: 12 (34%) male students and 23 (66%) female students. Five years earlier, as seniors in high school, the sample was composed of more male students (52%) than female students (48%). This follow-up sample's mean age was 23.0 (SD= 0.29) years, and education level was 15.11 (SD = 1.30) years. Nineteen students had earned a bachelor's degree, and 5 were still in college; I was attending graduate school, and no one was in a professional school. However, 19 (54%) indicated that they would attend graduate school in the future. Twenty-nine of the respondents lived in Colorado, and 6 lived in other states.
Follow-Up Study Instrument
I designed a four-page questionnaire, the Career Survey, to address many of the issues that had been examined over the previous years of the study. The Career Survey consisted primarily of numerically based, objective questions including Likert-scale items to minimize the amount of time for completion. Subjective, open-ended questions (except those about occupational aspiration/expectation) were generally avoided. Sections on the instrument included Work History, Education, Degree or Training, Other Activities After High School, Family, Reflections on Your High School Experience, and Attitudes About Education and Working. Some variables embedded in the instrument had been addressed since second grade, such as occupational aspiration, occupational expectation, and educational plans. Other questions addressed issues similar to those examined when the individuals were seniors in high school, such as Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS; U.S. Department of Labor, 1991a). (For a copy of the Career Survey, please contact the author.)
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