Relationships Among Supports and Barriers and Career and Educational Outcomes

Abstract

Interest in the roles of environmental supports and barriers in career and educational development has increased steadily over the past few decades, enough to warrant a meta-analysis of this vast and still growing literature. The current study presents the results of a meta-analytic investigation, employing 276 samples drawn from 249 published articles ( N = 104,440), on the relationships of supports and barriers to nine different career and educational outcomes. Employing a random effects meta-analytic model and sampling and measurement error-corrected effect size estimates, the study found that supports tended to account for more variance ( M = 10%) across all outcomes than did barriers ( M = 3%). Several moderators were also found, suggesting that (a) men’s self-efficacy beliefs and outcome expectations are more strongly related to supports than women’s, (b) Latino(a) students’ levels of school engagement and performance are more weakly related to supports than White students, and (c) supports (and perhaps barriers) seem to be more highly related to elementary school students’ levels school engagement than high school students. The implications of the results are discussed as well as potential avenues for future investigation suggested by some gaps in the literature uncovered in this meta-analysis.

Social Cognitive Career Theory at 25: Progress in Studying the Domain Satisfaction and Career Self-Management Models

“…Future research may also benefit from incorporating work conditions and outcomes into studies of academic satisfaction. This suggestion is consistent with findings linking campus climate and discrimination to college satisfaction, performance, and retention (Brown et al, 2018). We also think that outcome expectations deserve more study in research on work satisfaction.…”

Understanding the influence of a contextual factor, stigma consciousness: a barrier for underrepresented students in engineering

“…As stigma consciousness was a negative predictor of self-efficacy, it may be inferred to carry the deleterious effects of low self-efficacy on persistence and goal behaviors (Brown et al, 2008;Lee et al, 2015;Robbins et al, 2004;Wright, Jenkins-Guarnieri, & Murdock, 2012). This result also confirms Brown et al's (2018) meta-analysis in regard to relationships among supports and barriers and career and educational outcomes where they documented discrimination as a barrier accounted for approximately 9% of the variance in academic persistence, versus 1% or less of the variance for the other career and educational outcomes. This suggests the importance of continued efforts to reduce discrimination and promote equality in the school environment.…”

“…Additionally, coping efficacy for barriers to education and career was included as a variable that could lead to an understanding of how levels of confidence in responding to educational/career barriers might buffer the effect of negative racial/ethnic stigma consciousness. Thus, this study extends SCCT by incorporating a new construct and also including negative outcome expectations in the model, responding to a call for advancing research on SCCT with implications for potential interventions to help individuals in coping with environmentally imposed barriers (Brown et al, 2018;Lent et al, 2000).…”

“…Within the social cognitive framework, self-efficacy highlights the agent role of individuals in the interplay among environmental factors, personality affective traits, and goals directed behaviors, and work satisfaction (Lent & Brown, 2008). Prior studies have documented that self-efficacy is reliably related to choice goals that people develop (Lent et al, 1994;2018;Sheu et al, 2010) and moderately and slightly correlated with supports and barriers, respectively (Brown et al, 2018).…”

Assessing Postsecondary Barriers for Rural Appalachian High School Students

“…A meaningful way to measure perceived barriers in populations that embrace the themes found in our qualitative analysis—bootstrapper mentality, practical disconnect, localism, positive future mind-set, and lack of urgency—is vital in being able to design and deliver effective and meaningful career education and counseling interventions. Brown et al (2018) noted that researchers agree barriers negatively impact career and academic beliefs, but questions still exist about the magnitude and direction of these effects on SCCT variables. In the results of their meta-analysis of quantitative studies, they found that barriers only had a small effect on other SCCT outcome variables and suggested that focusing on support building may be more effective than barrier reduction.…”