The Relationship Between Attitudinal and Behavioral Aspects of Career Maturity

Abstract

The construct of career maturity has played a prominent role in career development theory. To have practical significance, however, career counselors should know that career maturity is linked to actual career-related behaviors. Toward this end, the current study investigated whether a meaningful relationship existed between an attitudinal measure of career maturity and a measure of career maturity reflecting job performance-related behavioral competencies in a sample of minority youth. Only modest relationships were found between several career maturity attitudes and the behavioral measures. Results are discussed and implications for career counselors working with minority adolescents are provided.

Careers in a Cultural Context

“…Previous research by Westbrook and his colleagues, reviewed in Westbrook and Sanford, also found a lack of relationship between cognitive measures of career maturity and appropriateness of choice and accuracy of selfappraisal for Black students. Westbrook and Sanford's ( 1991) findings coincided with those reported by Fouad and Keely (1992) for Black high school youth in a summer employment program. Fouad and Keely found that Blacks scored low on career maturity attitudes when compared with norm groups for the CMI, but that attitudes were not significantly related to behaviors considered critical to vocational maturity such as punctuality, responsibility, or attendance.…”

The Effects of Simultaneous Developmental Processes: Factors Relating to the Career Development of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Youth

“…Our findings must also be considered within the overall cultural and environmental context of the sample. Career development of adolescents, on the whole, has been theorized and found to relate to greater environmental contextual variables, including socioeconomic status, cultural context, school differences, and historical time (Lent, Brown, & Hackett, 1996;Schmitt-Rodermund & Silbereisen, 1998;Vondracek & Reitzle, 1998), as well as racial and gender demographics (Fouad & Keeley, 1992;Hardin, Leong, & Osipow, 2001;Luzzo, 1993;Wanberg & Muchinsky, 1992;Westbrook & Sanford, 1991). The data for this study were collected in middle-to upper-middle-class urban settings, and the majority of participants were living at home and enrolled in public high school.…”

Family systems as predictors of career attitude maturity for Korean high school students

“…On the basis of the traditional work by Super (1957) and Crites (1978), career maturity has been generally defined as the individual's readiness to make informed, age-appropriate career decisions and cope with career development tasks (Lundberg et al 1997;Savickas 1999). Career maturity is often perceived to consist of attitudinal and cognitive components (Crites 1978;Crites and Savickas 1995;Fouad and Keeley 1992). Among these, career attitude maturity is often described as having five aspects (Super 1969): (a) interest in career issues and effectiveness in career choice, (b) information collection and planning concerning career issues, (c) consistency in terms of type of career and data collection, (d) concrete understanding of self-personality and independence in terms of career issues, and (e) similarity of competence and interest.…”