Occupational perception and school stream in relation to job classifications, preferences and prestige for 17 year old girls and boys

Abstract

It is suggested that underlying most occupational classifications is a consensus of job perceptions, which can be reduced from elicited ratings of job similarities to multidimensional diagrammatic representations. Previous work is reviewed. Similarity ratings on 15 jobs, made by 101 Israeli 17 year olds, showed relative homogeneity within Roe, Holland and Flanagan fields, but the postulated order of fields within each system was not supported. Multidimensional scaling analysis yielded a cognitive map of the occupations with four fields which were more homogeneous, and corresponded to school vocational streams. Job locations in the map are unrelated to occupational prestige. Independently elicited desirability rankings, reduced by a novel technique to multidimensional affective representations, yielded the same fields, with jobs arranged differently, so as to correspond strongly to prestige gradients. All results are very similar for both sexes.

Multidimensional Scaling Research in Vocational Psychology

“…As is illustrated in Table 2, the bulk of the research in the area of occupational perceptions has been conducted by only a small number of investigators. The most systematic work has been conducted by Reeb (1959Reeb ( , 1971Reeb ( , 1974Reeb ( , 1979 using nonmetric scaling. Reeb has been concerned primarly with identifying the characteristics by which individuals organize occupational perceptions and with examining the generalizability of these dimensions.…”

“…Perceptions vs. clc~s,~~f'acc~ta®~a systems. Siess and Rogers (1974) and Reeb (1979) investigated the degree to which the perceived similarity of occupations corresponded to occupational classification systems. These studies are examples of investigations that are concerned with both the identification of the dimensions underlying occupational perceptions (dimensional approach) and the arrangement of occupations in N-dimensional space (configural approach).…”

“…Application of Torgerson's (19529 1958) algorithm to direct similarity judgments provided support for the relative homogeneity of judgments with fields and no support for their postulated circular order. Reeb (1979) compared direct suitability judgments on 15 occupations made by 101 male and female Israeli students to Roe's (1956), Holland's (1973), and Flanagan, Shaycoff, Richards, & Claudy's (1971) occupational classifications and to four academic areas. Since the occupations were selected to correspond with the occupations of the students in the four academic areas, it is not surprising that the normetric scaling procedure yielded a two-dimensional configuration with occupations grouping into four clusters corresponding to the four academic areas.…”

What are careers officers thinking of? How information cues are selected and used in careers interviews

“…This map comprises a mental grid of occupations in terms of requirements, content, social status and prestige: on to this grid, the careers officer can overlay his or her perceptions of the client's strengths, values, interests and situation (Kelly, 1989). Research findings demonstrate considerable agreement between individuals in a culture about the place of different jobs on the map, with experts in a field showing finer differentiation between the occupations about whch they know most (Reeb, 1979;Shubsachs & Davison, 1979;Pryor, 1987).…”

A Comparison of Internal, External, and Successive Unfolding Based on Occupational Judgments

“…Inspection of the between-phase F-ratios suggested that the vector model was the best model for a large majority of subjects in both types of unfolding. Rounds and Zevon (1983) reported several studies concerned with identifying dimensions of occupational perception (Burton, 1972;Coxon & Jones, 1978, 1979a, 1979bKraus et al, 1978;Reeb, 1959Reeb, , 1971Reeb, , 1974Reeb, ., 1979Shubsachs & Davison, 1979;Siess & Rogers, 1974). They reported that Downloaded from the Digital Conservancy at the University of Minnesota, http://purl.umn.edu/93227.…”