Children's vocational development: a research rationale.

Vocational development research and interventions have focused primarily on adolescents and young adults. The lack of attention to career development antecedents in children has led to a serious neglect of this period of life when the foundation is laid for career choices and outcomes in later life. A harmful by-product is the frequent preclusion of gender-atypical occupational pathways by boys and especially by girls. To address this situation, the authors recommend identifying a core set of constructs that describe children's vocational development and developing sound instruments to measure them, leading to a longitudinal study ranging from childhood to early adulthood.

Many researchers and the general public tacitly accept the view that childhood is a period of fantasy and play. Consequently, children are believed to be incapable of comprehending the world of work. This is a relatively modern view of childhood. Parsons (e.g., Parsons, 1909) reportedly not only acknowledged the importance of vocational development during the childhood period, but his experiences with children may have also had a significant impact on his early work (Munsterberg, 1913). Parsons's apparent concern for children's vocational development was borne from the necessity of the times. Before 1918, the United States did not universally mandate that children complete elementary school, which at the time extended to the eighth grade in many states (Krug, 1966); then, the largest fraction of 12- to 14-year-old children were therefore working or facing an imminent transition from school to work. Parsons confirmed this by reporting that only 6.2%, 3.2%, and 7.2% of the children attending primary schools in Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC, respectively, were predicted to complete the last year of high school. Parsons (1909) stated,

  There are not seats enough in the grammar schools, probably, for
  more than one tenth of [all the children in Boston, Philadelphia,
  and Washington, DC]. Our cities evidently do not expect or intend
  to educate the bulk of the boys and girls beyond the primaries or
  lower grammar grades. The mass of children go to work to earn their
  living as soon as they are old enough to meet the law, and often
  before that. (p. 161)

The timing of the transition from school to work led to Parsons's concern about children's work awareness and plans (or lack thereof) and consequently motivated him to provide vocational guidance to grade school children and to support the development of vocational guidance centers to serve them (Munsterberg, 1913). Although it is certainly recognizable that times have changed with respect to the demands and expectations placed on children, the necessity to study and act upon children's vocational development is currently as acute as ever.

In this article, we present a broad theoretical model of vocational development that casts middle childhood as the dawn of vocational development and includes those core constructs and mechanisms that presumably represent the essential antecedents of adolescent vocational development (Hartung, Porfeli, & Vondracek, 2005). After a brief review of the theoretical and empirical literature suggesting that childhood is an important period of career exploration and learning, we forward a rationale supporting longitudinal research beginning in the middle to late childhood period and extending into adolescence and beyond. This rationale is supported by an ongoing and increasing interest in how gendered conceptions of work, which presumably form during the early childhood period, circumscribe and otherwise influence vocational development during the childhood and adolescent periods and beyond. The rationale is further supported by the disturbing findings that large numbers of children in the United States are failing to complete high school and that most public education systems presently offer few services to help high school students seek and obtain career-track jobs. Finally, we conclude this article with suggested steps that should be taken next to initiate a basic research program to examine how children are socialized to the world of work and how they develop an orientation toward work.

Vocational Development During Childhood

Despite the increasing delay in the transition from school to work and the tacit view of children being disconnected from the world of work, theorists addressing life span career development across the 20th century have attended to childhood as an important formative period of career development (Erikson, 1964,1968; Ginsberg, Ginsburg, Axelrad, & Herma, 1951; Gottfredson, 1981; Havighurst, 1964; Super, 1957; Super, Savickas, & Super, 1996; Vondracek, 2001a). The consensus among these scholars suggests that children, as early as in the grade school years, establish a worker orientation and a coherent view of the world of work. Although Super (1957) and Havighurst have made only general assertions about childhood, other theorists, including Gottfredson and Erikson (1964, 1968), have provided deeper insight into certain aspects of vocational development, such as the processes by which sex roles shape career aspirations and when and how children establish an orientation to the worker role. Unfortunately, the majority of this theoretical work has gone unexplored in the empirical literature devoted to children (Hartung et al., 2005).

The combination of the aforementioned theoretical work and the empirical work devoted to children's vocational development (Hartung et al., 2005) yields a largely unexplored model of how children are socialized to become members of the workforce (see Figure 1) as a means of placing the childhood period along a developmental continuum that leads to adolescence and beyond. This life span model of career development presumes that children are socialized to work during middle and late childhood, and these early experiences have an impact on psychosocial adjustment throughout vocational identity development (Erikson, 1968; Vondracek, 2001a). Within the model, vocational exploration represents a pivotal mechanism that facilitates socialization and learning during this period (Flum & Blustein, 2000; Goldstein & Oldham, 1979; Havighurst, 1964; Super, 1990; Super et al., 1996). Presumably, the exploratory process of learning about work (Jordaan, 1963) in relationship to an emerging sense of self-concept (Harter, 1999) shapes the development of a vocational identity and self-concept (Schmitt-Rodermund & Vondracek, 1999), values (Porfeli, 2004, 2007), and interests (Holland, 1997), and this exploratory process may begin as early as the grade school years (Patton & Porfeli, 2007). Researchers generally agree that these aspects of development are crucial in educational and vocational planning and in choices made during adolescence and early adulthood (Archer, 1989; Blustein & Noumair, 1996; Havighurst, 1964; Holland, 1997; Kroger, 1993; Porfeli, 2004; Savickas, 2002; Super, 1957; Super et al., 1996; Vondracek, 1995; Vondracek, Schulenberg, Skorikov, Gillespie, & Wahlheim, 1995).

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Empirical Findings

Despite the theoretical advances within the field, empirical research on children's vocational behavior has gone largely unappreciated and unexplored in the broader child development and career literatures (Hartung et al., 2005; Watson & McMahon, 2005). Two factors may contribute to this fact. First, researchers and practitioners commonly view childhood as a period of fantasy and play that is cognitively disconnected from the world of work (Trice, Hughes, Odom, Woods, & McClellan, 1995). A review of empirical research during the past century suggests that children as young as 4 and 5 years old have a fairly realistic understanding of occupations, which becomes more stable over time (Hartung et al., 2005). Second, the existing literature of more than 200 articles is largely disconnected from developmental science and education and is limited to basic cross-sectional research designs and statistical models (Watson & McMahon, 2005). Moreover, many researchers in this area ask the same questions and come to similar, generally descriptive conclusions.

Despite the limitations and marginalized status of this literature, the research conducted to this point hints at the significance of vocational development during the childhood period. Five general findings derived from literature reviews by Hartung et al. (2005) and Watson and McMahon (2005) suggest that vocational development may be linked to an emerging sense of self as early as the grade school years. These findings also speak to some of the presumed theoretical mechanisms and functions influencing development through the adolescent years (see Figure 1). The five findings are as follows:

1. Children learn much more about the world of work than many assume, and 4-year-olds can accurately distinguish occupations by the sex of people who tend to occupy them.

2. Career aspirations are relatively stable and become more so across the grade school years. These aspirations are influenced by gender-based occupational stereotypes throughout grade school and beyond.

3. Career aspirations tend to be influenced by occupational stereotypes and a circumscription mechanism that channels girls away from math and science careers and boys away from female-dominated professions.

4. Economically impoverished and African American and Hispanic children tend to maintain less prestigious career aspirations, and African American children exhibit a greater difference in the prestige of career aspirations and expectations, than do their wealthier Caucasian peers across the grade school years.

5. Children tend to move away from sensational or glamorous career aspirations (e.g., professional athlete) and toward a sharper focus on realistic aspirations and aspects of careers related to their self-identified talents and interests across the grade school years.

These five main findings suggest that vocational learning and aspirations may be involved in a complex, dynamic relationship with an emerging sense of self that includes elements of sex, race, and social class. Some longitudinal research has been conducted on the theoretical link between sex and career aspirations (e.g., Cook et al., 1996; Helwig, 2001; Liben & Bigler, 2002). However, few studies have approached many of these questions with a longitudinal design, and none have done so from the grade school to the high school years.

Implications of the Theoretical and Empirical Literature

Helping elementary and secondary school students cope with the vocational tasks they confront fosters school success and positive self-perceptions (Herr & Cramer, 1997). Children who exhibit these qualities are well positioned to engage in the exploratory behavior and cognitive development required for sound educational and occupational plans (Super, Starishevsky, Matlin, & Jordaan, 1963). Increased career exploration in adolescence is clearly associated with more favorable vocational development. Adolescents who actively explore career choices obtain occupations that are more congruent with their emerging sense of self (Blustein, Phillips, Jobin-Davis, Finkelberg, & Roarke, 1997; Jordaan, 1963; Super & Hall, 1978; Vondracek et al., 1995). This ultimately leads to more satisfaction during the early adult years (Blustein et al., 1997). Adolescents who successfully transition from school to secure jobs that are congruent with their talents, values, and interests are better positioned to achieve other important life goals, such as family role aspirations and expectations associated with the adult years (Schulenberg, Maggs, & O'Malley, 2003).

Sex Roles and Aspirations

Research focusing on early and middle childhood may help parents and practitioners understand how to prevent children and adolescents from unwisely choosing a career based on socially structured factors such as sex roles, race, and socioeconomic status. The National Science Foundation (NSF) supports, for example, applied and basic research that addresses the gender imbalance in the math and science fields, because a large body of research indicates that relatively few women pursue careers in math and science despite the growing demand for these professions (e.g., Schoon & Parsons, 2002; Wigfield, Battle, Keller, & Eccles, 2002). Interventionists have responded by developing programs that encourage young women to explore and adopt career plans in the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields during the later high school or postsecondary years (e.g., Denmark, 1999; Giurleo, 1997; McCormick & Wolf, 1993; Shapka & Keating, 2003). This work has achieved mixed success in shaping women's educational plans and choices. The extant empirical and theoretical literature suggests that researchers and interventionists should consider shifting their attention away from adolescence and early adulthood and toward childhood, before gendered conceptions of the world of work crystallize (Liben & Bigler, 2002) and become inexorably bound to a child's increasingly stable career aspirations and emerging identity, interests, and general sense of self (Harter, 1998, 1999) relative to the world of work. As quoted by Aimee Dorr, dean of the University of California, Los Angeles, Graduate School of Education, and Gerald Lesser, cofounder of Sesame Street and distinguished professor of education at Harvard University,

  our failure to take account of the early antecedents to career
  choice may be especially damaging to women and minorities. In
  addition to the other obstacles to occupational equality for women
  and minorities, it is possible that they do not at adolescence
  choose certain occupations because they do not know about them,
  do not realize that the occupation may be accessible to them, or
  do not understand the steps that must be taken to prepare, enter,
  and succeed in an occupation. Thus, it seems important to consider
  career awareness among very young children and to trace its
  development into adolescence and adulthood. (Dorr & Lesser,
  1980, p. 43)

Educational Attainment and Timing of Vocational Tasks

Engaging in favorable vocational development and finding a deeply rewarding career-track job is difficult for those who complete high school but virtually impossible for those who fail to do so (Schneider & Stevenson, 2000). Even today, some U.S. states require children to attend school until their 16th birthday (rather than the 12th grade). This legislation translates into a meaningful fraction of students facing the transition to work during the middle adolescent period rather than during the transition from late adolescence to early adulthood. The consequences that students bear after prematurely leaving high school (i.e., "dropping out") are profound (Osborn & Baggerly, 2004) and may include protracted bouts of unemployment; lower income; poor physical and emotional well-being; and a higher risk of drug abuse, welfare dependence, and incarceration (Osborn & Baggerly, 2004). Estimates indicate that 67% of prison inmates in the United States are high school dropouts (Thornburgh, 2006), and inmates place an additional burden of $250 billion on the U.S. economy (Lunenburg, 1999).

Approximately 50% of all adolescents who complete high school do not pursue or complete a postsecondary education and are referred to as the "forgotten half" (William T. Grant Foundation, 1988). Furthermore, only approximately 25% of all people in the United States complete a bachelor's degree (Stern, Finkelstein, Stone, Latting, & Dornsife, 1994). Those students who do not pursue a postsecondary education have less time and fewer resources to find and obtain a rewarding career than do their college-bound peers who generally have at least 4 years and a host of campus-based career development resources and networking opportunities. Research suggests that guidance counselors at the elementary, middle, and high school levels report spending "very little" time conducting career counseling and career assessment, but they report a strong desire to devote more time to career-related activities (Osborn & Baggerly, 2004). It is not surprising that a recent study reported that 60% of high school seniors rate their school as "fair" or "poor" in teaching them the skills needed to obtain a job, and approximately 50% of them lack the practical skills necessary to prepare for college or for work (National Governor's Association, 2005). Not only are non-college-bound youth short on time, they and their guidance counselors suggest that few school resources are devoted to vocational development.

Adding to these challenges, approximately 29% of all U.S. students failed to graduate from high school in recent years (Greene, 2001; Thornburgh, 2006). These disturbing figures suggest that high school dropouts and those who earn some alternative form of a high school diploma (e.g., a general equivalency diploma) represent a large fraction of the forgotten half. Even more disturbing is the clear association between race/ethnicity and the failure to graduate from high school. Whereas 80% of Caucasian students graduated from high school in the late 1990s, only approximately 50% to 60% of their African American and Latino American peers graduated during the same period (Greene, 2001; Hauser, Simmons, & Pager, 2000; Kaufman, Alt, & Chapman, 2001; Standard-Powell, 2003). This difference combined with other factors, such as socioeconomic status, translates, approximately, into only a 60% employment-to-population ratio for African American males as opposed to a 70% ratio for Caucasian males ages 16 to 65 years (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2005). (The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' employment-to-population ratio includes discouraged workers and others that official unemployment statistics leave out. These statistics are taken from the April 2005 data.) These associations, coupled with long-standing associations between race and socioeconomic status, suggest that minority populations and those living in poverty may particularly benefit from vocational and career research prior to the adolescent period, because, as a group, they tend to have much less time to choose a secure career path that will yield the economic and emotional resources necessary to sustain them through the young adult years when childbearing and family formation are most common. Furthermore, reinforcing connections between school (i.e., thinking) and work (i.e., doing) during the primary and middle grades may have a favorable impact on student achievement, particularly for those who fail to grasp the connection and therefore are less motivated to achieve in school.

A Rationale for Research and Intervention

The research reviewed in this article suggests that many children circumscribe their career options along gender lines during the middle childhood period, and a substantial portion of children in the U.S. educational system leave school prematurely and are ill prepared to seek and obtain a lucrative and secure career-track job. A meaningful percentage of children would therefore be likely to benefit from basic research efforts devoted to understanding the importance of vocational development from a less gendered vantage before the high school years. Elementary and middle school guidance programs presently devote few resources to vocational development, and many school counseling resources are now being expended to address federal and state standardized testing mandates associated with the No Child Left Behind Act (Lewis, 2005). Should a grade school or middle school commit their scarce resources to providing career education services, counselors will presently find little empirical research to guide the development of their thinking and programming. Ultimately, these conditions reinforce a continued disconnect between school and work in U.S. schools (Hamilton & Hamilton, 1999) and between school counseling practices and developmental science (Galassi & Akos, 2004). Ultimately, these conditions represent significant barriers to favorable vocational development for all children and particularly those who face an accelerated transition into the workforce.

Current Intervention Efforts and Barriers to Their Success

This article is largely an endorsement for intervention efforts that aim to engage children in the process of career exploration and learning with the intent of establishing a healthy orientation to the world of work. This position has begun to be supported by practitioners within the career counseling and school counseling/guidance fields (Paterson, 2005). For example, Florida is one of the first states in the United States to develop plans to include a required comprehensive curriculum to engage middle school students in a study of the world of work (Luscombe, 2006). Other states, such as Mississippi, Oklahoma, and the Carolinas, have developed curricula, but they tend to be optional and less structured than the program proposed by Florida, which would mandate a 9-week course of study that yields a 5-year academic and career development plan for each student (Luscombe, 2006). Moreover, funding agencies in the United States have developed an interest in and begun to fund interventions during the early adolescent period that focus on engaging children in STEM academic and career fields as early as the middle school years. Deputy Director of the NSF Kathie L.Olsen (2006) has stated in reference to President Bush's American Competitiveness Initiative,

  Adequate preparation of our students in STEM fields is central to
  this aim. As the President said, we need to "ensure that
  America's children succeed in life...and that America succeeds
  in the world."

  NSF will play a major role in this ambitious, 10-year, interagency
  effort. An important component of the NSF task is helping to
  prepare the nation's technological workforce for the 21st Century,
  while working with educators to provide America's children with a
  strong foundation in K-12 science, technology, engineering and
  mathematics. (5-6)

Unfortunately, these proposed and ongoing intervention efforts are constrained by a lack of basic research on how children learn about, are socialized to, and develop an orientation toward the world of work in family, school, and other community contexts. In addition, intervention efforts that necessitate quantitative assessment to ascertain their impact (e.g., interventions funded by federal agencies) are further hindered by the aforementioned deficit on the measurement side of the literature. Many interventionists and their assessment colleagues are often faced with the prospect of developing instruments to assess vocational development with little or no understanding of the children's vocational development literature (which is dispersed over many disciplines and their publication outlets) and with inadequate resources or time to engage in proper pilot testing. All of these constraints, of course, limit the validity of their findings, and this practice of one-off assessment tools also contributes to the lack of cohesiveness within the literature. We found in our review of this literature, for example, that constructs with the same concept label are measured in vastly different ways, and identical (or very similar) constructs with similar assessment strategies often carry different concept labels (Hartung et al., 2005).

A Proposed Research Agenda

Although some may argue that the elementary and middle school years may be too early to think and learn about the world of work and to begin the process of establishing a vocational identity, the research findings presented here suggest otherwise. Identifying those person-in-situation influences that significantly enhance or impede vocational exploration and development will help career counselors understand how a playful, fantasy-oriented child becomes a goal-directed adolescent who endeavors to remain in school, explore the world of work, define an occupational calling, develop a sense of vocational self, and secure a career that satisfies and is congruent with contextual opportunities and pressures such as parental desires and community expectations. This work is particularly important to children who face a more imminent transition to the workforce and will become more important to all children as they must make a series of life-changing career choices in the face of a fiercely competitive and changing global labor market that will continue to place new and greater demands upon the U.S. workforce (Porfeli & Vondracek, in press).

Munsterberg (1913) spoke of Parsons's (1909) work with grade school children (up to the eighth grade) and Parsons's three-part plan to conduct a systematic program of research and intervention. The first part of the plan involved a systematic study of a host of occupations and their characteristics so that this information could be provided to counselors and their clients. The second part called for efforts to work with schools to translate the science of vocational guidance into a curriculum designed to engage children in career exploration and choices. Then, Munsterberg (1913) stated,

  Thirdly,--and this is for us the most important point--[Parsons] saw
  that the [research] methods had to be elaborated in such a way that
  the personal traits and dispositions might be discovered with much
  greater exactitude and with much richer detail than was possible
  through what a mere call on the vocational counselor could unveil.
  (pp. 40-41)

Over the following 9 to 10 decades, the field has carried out the plan to help adolescents find and make career plans and choices. Unfortunately, the second and third elements of the plan have been almost ignored as it applies to helping elementary school and middle school children develop an orientation to the world of work. (This aspect of the plan is commonly misinterpreted to mean that children should be asked to make a firm career plan or choice early in life and, therefore, it continues to be resisted. See Luscombe, 2006, for an example of how this plan is commonly misinterpreted by the general public.) In fact, many of the prescriptive elements aimed at implementing psychological and developmental science and counseling practice presented by Munsterberg (1913) almost 100 years ago are goals researchers continue to address in the current career literature (Vondracek, 2001b).

Bearing on the most important aspect of Parsons's (1909) plan, the bulk of the measurement work devoted to children's vocational development over the past 100 years has been sporadic and largely disconnected from other measurement efforts. Most studies use instruments that were developed to conduct one or two studies and were not used in subsequent research. Responding to these issues, Hartung et al. (2005) concluded that vocational exploration, expectations and aspirations, interests, and maturity are the focal constructs within the field. The authors further concluded that no consistent operational definition of these constructs exists and that this limitation threatens the validity of the findings obtained. Remedying this situation is a necessary first step toward any comprehensive, interdisciplinary, and longitudinal investigation of vocational development spanning the late childhood and early adolescent years. Additionally, a core set of instruments would be an important precursor to establishing a unified body of research that extends across different programs of research and populations.

The first author of this article has spent the past 2 years developing and testing a fully Web-based, theoretically eclectic battery of instruments, which includes the core constructs identified by Hartung et al. (2005). The instrument has been developed to conduct basic, longitudinal, interdisciplinary research spanning the elementary, middle, and high school grades with the aim of assessing the antecedents of adolescent vocational development. The instrument necessitates computer skills (e.g., using a mouse and keyboard in a Web environment) consistent with competencies typically expected of second-and third-grade students in public education (International Society for Technology in Education, 2000). The pilot test included fourth-through sixth-grade children who were assessed in their school setting. The analyses and results springing from this work are too extensive to detail here, but the preliminary psychometric properties (i.e., reliability and construct validity) are promising and are generally consistent with the growing literature suggesting that the Web-based environment is a valid milieu for conducting survey research (Buchanan & Smith, 1999; Gosling, Vazire, Srivastava, & John, 2004; Johnson, 2005; Senior & Smith, 1999).

The new instrument, being theoretically eclectic, permits an examination of many different theories bearing on vocational development. This approach to instrument development does not, however, permit a test of any particular theory with great depth, as do a few existing instruments, such as the Childhood Career Development Scale (Stead & Schultheiss, 2003). Future work could involve collaborations between authors of existing instruments with an aim toward integrating and consolidating the key features and strengths of each to arrive at a sound and comprehensive battery of instruments that is consistent with prevailing theory and existing empirical research and would attract others to implement aspects of it within their programs of research. Moreover, this work could include the development of instruments to be used in the pursuit of basic research and program assessment efforts and instruments to be used in the course of engaging students in career interventions. Although these two classes of instrumentation may share some common ground, each class could include differences in terms of content, layout, and supplemental materials available to children and practitioners. For example, instrumentation tailored to practitioners and children could include Web-or paper-based materials linking the results from an assessment tool to career resources bearing on a particular child's assessed values and interests.

Conclusion

Theory and research confirm that a truly life span conception of career development must include the essential antecedent constructs and mechanisms that emerge during the childhood period and serve as a foundation for career development during adolescence and into adulthood. Understanding how childhood experiences serve to influence the course of career development remains a largely open question. This knowledge deficit represents a serious barrier to intervention agendas and efforts to reduce gender role circumscription. It also impedes the career awareness of school-age children and particularly affects the large fraction of children who have only a few years before they leave school prematurely and face an increasingly competitive labor force. The first step in addressing this lamentable state of affairs is to establish a core set of constructs and instruments to assess children's vocational development, followed by a second step that involves planning and executing a longitudinal study of vocational development from grade school through the high school years and possibly into adulthood. Much of this work was proposed almost 100 years ago and, for a variety of reasons, has yet to be accomplished. The first author, as well as others (Stead & Schultheiss, 2003), have begun the measurement work, and we are hopeful that our work in this special section will influence other researchers (and perhaps more important, funding agencies) to establish research on children's vocational development as a priority in the years to come.

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Erik J. Porfeli and Paul J. Hartung, Department of Behavioral Sciences, Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine and Pharmacy; Fred W. Vondracek, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Erik J. Porfeli, Department of Behavioral Sciences, Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine and Pharmacy, 4209 S.R. 44, Rootstown, OH 44272-0095 (e-mail: [e-mail]).