Exploring Late Adolescents’ Experiences with Career-Related Messages on Entertainment TV and in Social Media in Belgium: A Focus Group Study

Abstract

Media is an important socialization actor through which adolescents can learn about careers. Nine focus group interviews were conducted with 44 late adolescents ( Mage = 16.27; SDage= 0.54; 56.82% female) in high schools in Belgium to explore how youth in this age group receive career-related messages, the work tasks, skills, values, and ethics that are cultivated, and the ways adolescents experience and judge the perceived realism of career-related messages received via entertainment TV/social media. A combined inductive and deductive thematic analysis of the data revealed various pathways through which adolescents intentionally and unintentionally received career-related messages. Moreover, the adolescents had been cultivated to value specific work tasks/skills (e.g., social skills) and intrinsic and extrinsic work values and work ethics (e.g., working hard to succeed, centrality of work) when consuming career-related messages through TV/social media. Lastly, the perceived realism of such messages depended on content elements (e.g., a balanced portrayal of work values). Differences related to career-related messages on social media versus entertainment TV were observed. Practical implications for various groups (e.g., career counselors, media content producers) are discussed.

Counter-Stereotypical Career-Related Media Content and Adolescents’ Professional Sexism: A Longitudinal Study of Woman Boss Television Series and Social Media Posts

“…Such job-related posts can come from different types of socialization actors, including not only influencers, and celebrities, but also people in adolescents' own networks who have more typical jobs such as teachers (I. Vranken & Vandenbosch, 2022). These socialization actors can share textual information (e.g., captions) and visual information (e.g., pictures and videos) via social media's ephemeral and 7 COUNSTERSTEREOTYPICAL MEDIA AND PROFESSIONAL SEXISM persistent features (e.g., stories and timeline posts, respectively).…”

“…Third, the underlying motivations for consuming television series and social media content may differ (Pittman & Sheehan, 2015;I. Vranken & Vandenbosch, 2022).…”

“…Vranken & Vandenbosch, 2022). Users consume both television series and social media for entertainment purposes (Bossen & Kottasz, 2020;Papacharissi & Mendelson, 2007;I. Vranken & Vandenbosch, 2022), but social motivations such as surveilling and connecting with others are much more influential on the consumption of social media than television series (Bossen & Kottasz, 2020;I.…”

“…As previous research on the impact of counter-stereotypical professional portrayals is limited and often quite old (Miller & Reeves, 1976;O'Bryant & Corder-Bolz, 1978), it is unclear how and under which circumstances exposure to portrayals of women in atypical professions in the current media landscape can impact adolescents. More precisely, prior studies have focused on the effects of television content among non-adolescent groups (Bond, 2016) but have not considered late adolescents, an age group that is seeking to be informed about their options in the professional world and consume media as part of that information search (Levine & Hoffner, 2006;I. Vranken & Vandenbosch, 2022) to make a career choice (Vondracek & Porfeli, 2006).…”

“…Developmental literature points at this phase as a key period for developing a career trajectory in which adolescents try to make career choices and investigate which careers would fit with their own (gender) identities (Vondracek & Porfeli, 2006). However, as not all adolescents have real-life working experience (Desilver, 2015), they may be dependent on other socialization actors, including the media, to provide them with career-related information (Myers et al, 2011;I. Vranken & Vandenbosch, 2022).…”