Turning Around to Look Ahead: Views of Vocational Psychology in 2001 and 2019

Strengths

We begin first with a review of the strengths of vocational psychology. The authors spanned the breadth of the field of vocational psychology including scholars from the counseling psychology perspective (e.g., Blustein, Lent, Subich), the organizational perspective (e.g., Hesketh, Russell), and a developmental perspective (Vondracek, 2001). Across the group, they identified over 30 areas of strengths, which, in our estimation, still exist. These include a strong theoretical foundation (Hesketh, 2001; Lent, 2001) and a strong empirical tradition with an emphasis on measuring individual differences (Gottfredson, 2001; Vondracek, 2001). These two elements help to define a field that is distinct (Subich, 2001). Also, the field has contributed a great deal of knowledge to our understanding about work and work decisions, particularly for adolescents and young adults making initial work decisions (Fouad, 2001).

Weaknesses

However, just as the 2001 scholars lauded the field for strong theoretical and empirical bases, they also saw the field as relatively insular and narrow. Several authors noted that vocational psychology neither is informed by, nor informs, the work of other psychologists. Hesketh (2001) and Subich (2001) commented that this is particularly true of connecting to research in cognitive psychology, especially in information processing and decision-making. Since vocational psychologists often study how to make work-related decisions, the lack of connection to cognitive psychology seemed to be a lost opportunity. Walsh (2001) argued for the need to integrate studies of interests, self-efficacy, personality, and well-being, labeling this as interacting domains. Hesketh (2001) contended that vocational psychology was not paying enough attention to information technology and accurately predicted it would change the nature of work. Vondracek (2001) commented that vocational psychology “is all but invisible in most psychology departments” (p. 254), particularly noting the need to more strongly contribute to developmental psychology. Several authors (Gottfredson, 2001; Lent, 2001; Tinsley, 2001) decried the arbitrary split between vocational psychology from organizational psychology. Although the dependent variable is at the individual level for both specialty areas, and often, the questions are the same (e.g., how to help individuals make career or work-related decisions), scholars in these different areas were found to draw from different theories or related scholarship, leading to “blurry lines,” as Russell termed it (2001, p. 228). She recommended that researchers thoroughly review and integrate different literatures. As Fouad (2001) noted “too often, we talk only to ourselves” (p. 186).

Several authors commented on the narrow focus of the populations studied in vocational psychology, not just by age but also by race/ethnicity and social class. Blustein (2001) noted the inherent middle-class bias in the work of vocational scholars, and Fouad (2001), Lent (2001), and Subich (2001) identified the narrow populations studied by scholars as a major weakness in the field. Conversely, though, Gottfredson (2001) took issue with the automatic assumption about the need for different tests or interventions for different groups, arguing that vocational scholars should test “cultural-perspective hypotheses for validity through research before accepting them” (p. 195).

A final set of identified weaknesses focused on limitations of research. Concerns were voiced that it was too correlational and not theory-based (Fouad, 2001), too quantitative (and not focusing on qualitative contributions (Blustein, 2001), had too few studies that focused on interventions (Fouad, 2001; Lent, 2001), and was too fragmented (Russell, 2001). Tinsley (2001) argued that often, only parts of theories were being studied rather than the whole model. As a former JVB editor, Tinsley also criticized authors who were not critical enough of their findings. There were allegations that the overall research enterprise in vocational psychology was weak (Subich, 2001), lacked rigor (Russell, 2001), or that it was conducted by poorly trained scientists who had spent too much time learning to be practitioners (Gottfredson, 2001).

There is a seeming contradiction between the strengths and weaknesses identified by the authors, due in part to differences in perspectives of the authors, or perhaps each author’s overall self-identified level of optimism. Nonetheless, Savickas (2001b) summarized the weaknesses as that the authors concluded the field was insular. He used the analogy of vocational psychology as inhabiting two islands, where the “inhabitants share an interest in vocational behavior but at different points in the life cycle…. Rarely do members of the two cultures visit each other” (p. 285).

Opportunities

The authors were writing in 2001, prior to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the 2008 Great Recession, and the growth in technology adoption and globalization that have also led to dramatic changes in the social contract between worker and employer (Blustein, 2017). Thus, the opportunities they identified 20 years ago were very much connected to the weaknesses they identified. These included a broader definition of population of interest including racially/ethnically diverse students (Lent, 2001), non-college-bound students (Russell, 2001), and other demographic changes (Blustein, 2001). There were some calls to study how technology might change vocational development (Hesketh, 2001) and work (Tinsley, 2001). There was encouragement to take advantage of opportunities to inform public policy (Lent, 2001) and to do better intervention research that would, in turn, inform educational and workplace policies. Some talked about the opportunities to study work–life balance (e.g., Vondracek, 2001). Finally, several talked about the opportunities inherent in better and more sophisticated methodological techniques that would further help research in the area.

Threats

Interestingly, the threats to the field focused much more on integration of science and practice (or lack thereof) than the other areas. Some worried about the appropriation of vocational psychology by other fields (Fouad, 2001; Tinsley, 2001), while others were concerned about the appropriation of vocational psychology services by other fields (Gottfriedson, 2001; Lent, 2001). There was a worry that vocational psychology would disappear from counseling psychology.

Overarching Recommendations

In the summary of the SWOT analyses completed by all 10 authors, Betz (2001) identified agreements among the authors, such as the need to extend vocational questions to racial and sexual minorities, as well as to keep up the robust research program on understanding women’s career development. Betz also wrote about the importance of increasing methodological diversity in the field and concurred with Fouad (2001) and Tinsley (2001) about the necessity of programmatic research to answer systematically complex questions in vocational psychology. Savickas (2001b) followed up in his summary by suggesting that programmatic research with diverse epistemologies should be a part of the mission and objectives of vocational psychology at that particular time point. In summation of the authors’ identified weaknesses and opportunities, Savickas also recommended that the field reaffirm research as the core activity of vocational psychology, forge links with related disciplines within the broader field of psychological research, and continue to bridge the rift between science and practice.

Strengths

In the past two decades, the field has continued to grow and strengthen by many measures, building on what Tinsley (2001) called the research rigor of the field. In the research realm, there are several journals that continue to publish vocational psychology articles: JVB, Journal of Career Assessment, Career Development Quarterly, and Journal of Career Development, with many vocational scholars also submitting manuscripts to the Journal of Counseling Psychology and The Counseling Psychologist or Career Development International. Each of the vocational psychology journals reports an increase in submissions, especially international submissions, and in impact rating. For example, the JVB reported over 850 submissions (nearly 50% increase from 2015) in 2018, and an increased impact rating of 3.052, and the Journal of Career Assessment reported over 150 submissions in 2018, and the impact rating increased to 1.67.

Two recent reviews have focused on analyzing trends in vocational research that also demonstrate the strength of research in vocational psychology. Byington, Felps, and Baruch (2018) used a bibliometric analysis to analyze the 1,490 articles published in the JVB from 1994 to 2016. Akkermans and Kubash (2017) focused on the 693 articles published in the Journal of Career Assessment, Career Development International, Journal of Career Development, and the Career Development Quarterly for a shorter period (2012–2016). Although the journals and time span covered for each analysis were different, the sheer number of articles across these journals attests to the growth in the field. Many of the identified trends were similar across the two review articles (e.g., employee attitudes, career success, work–family integration, attitudes). Clearly, vocational psychology journals are attracting top quality manuscripts that are, in turn, informing the work of other scholars.

In the practice realm, researchers have turned to investigating aspects of career counseling and interventions. There have been enough studies to warrant meta-analyses. Whiston, Li, Mitts, and Wright’s (2017) meta-analysis of career choice counseling found that counselor support is a critical ingredient of career choice counseling. They also found that, overall, career counseling was effective. Clients who received career choice interventions were a third of a standard deviation on career choice outcomes than those who did not receive an intervention. Whiston, Rossier, and Baron (2017) reviewed the meta-analyses on the broader group of career interventions, also concluding they are moderately effective. They also highlighted two intervention strategies that meet the U.S. Department of Education’s criteria for evidence-based interventions (Institute of Education Science [IES], 2018). The first set of intervention strategies are the five critical ingredients initially identified by Brown and Krane (2000) that should be included in career choice counseling: written exercises, individual interpretations and feedback, world of work information, modeling opportunities, and helping clients to build social support. These five ingredients significantly influence choice outcomes. The second intervention they identified is the JOBS program from Michigan, an intervention program designed to help individuals with job search strategies. Researchers involved with this program have developed a treatment manual and conducted randomized clinical trials, one of the IES criteria for identifying an effective interventions. Whiston et al., note, though, that finding only two effective interventions demonstrates the need for much more research in this area.

Also related to practice, an initiative of the Society of Vocational Psychology (SVP) was to develop practice guidelines for psychologists to integrate work into their clinical practices. Six guidelines were identified that focused on helping clinicians gain an understanding of the role of work in people’s lives, including the relationship of work to mental health. These guidelines were adopted by the American Psychological Association (APA) as practice guidelines in 2016 and are now available on the APA website (Whiston, Fouad, & Juntunen, 2016). Thus, strides have been made to help document that career counseling is effective and that applied psychologists need to incorporate a client’s work and work decisions into their clinical practices.

Weaknesses and Threats in 2019

In the past two decades, the field, overall, has addressed some of the weaknesses identified in 2001. There is some evidence that vocational psychology has seen an increase in qualitative research over the past two decades, somewhat addressing Fouad’s (2001) concerns that vocational psychology relies too heavily on survey research (Lazazzara, Tims, & de Gennaro, 2019; T. W. Lee, Mitchell, & Sablynski, 1999; McMahon, Watson, & Lee, 2019). In fact, vocational psychology has become very good at inquiring whether a specific set of psychological processes work qualitatively. One example of this is the calling literature (Dik & Duffy, 2009, 2013), where the construct has been investigated psychometrically (Dik, Eldridge, Steger, & Duffy, 2012) and qualitatively (Bott et al., 2017), which then led to some further articulation of the construct (Dik & Shimizu, 2019). Additionally, other theories such as the PWT have been more directly developed in light of qualitative investigations (Autin et al., 2018).

Qualitative research has also been useful in uncovering cultural nuances for career development processes that would otherwise be lost in correlational research. This is particularly useful for those at the various intersections of identity such as gender, race, sexual orientation, or social class. Some examples of this include social class and upward mobility for White men (Kallschmidt & Eaton, 2018), intelligent career success for academics (Beigi, Shirmohammadi, & Arthur, 2018), and first-generation college students (Tate et al., 2015). There have been enough qualitative studies in specific areas to warrant reviews. For example, Lazazzara, Tims, and de Gennaro (2019) wrote a meta-synthesis of qualitative studies related to job crafting, and McMahon, Watson, and Lee (2019) wrote a review of qualitative career assessment as a process. This is encouraging considering that 20 years ago, T. W. Lee, Mitchell, and Sablynski (1999) were arguing for more qualitative research in both organizational and vocational psychology. They suggested that qualitative research can be used for three purposes: theory building, theory elaboration, and theory testing; providing exemplar articles in each area. They additionally showcased methods that could be used for each of the three purposes. These approaches included grounded theory and hermeneutical approaches to data for the purpose, in this instance, of theory elaboration. Since then, we have seen vocational psychologists become increasingly interested in varying the methodologies in order to better capture the nuances of the construct. For instance, some additional examples from the calling literature (e.g., Hunter, Dik, & Banning, 2010; Zhang, Dik, Wei, & Zhang, 2015) use a combined grounded and hermeneutical approach to the data known as qualitative document analysis (Altheide, Coyle, Devriese, & Schneider, 2008) to capture how different cultural groups experience calling. In addition, Bott et al. (2017) used a consensual qualitative research paradigm (Hill, 2012) to reveal the nuances in callings experienced by physicians. Each of these studies adds to our understanding of the nuances of the calling construct itself and subsequently captures the subtleties of peoples’ lived experiences.

Relatedly, vocational psychology has made some progress in investigating intersectional differences and applicability of vocational models to marginalized groups. This has been most evident in research on the social cognitive career theory (SCCT; Lent et al., 1994, 2000). Much of this research was summarized in a special issue of the Journal of Career Assessment in 2016, with Flores, Navarro, and Ali (2017) and Fouad and Santana (2017) reviewing the literature on Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT) and social class and race/ethnicity in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) areas, respectively. The other model that has helped the field focus on marginalized groups is the PWT (Duffy, Blustein, Diemer, & Autin, 2016). PWT explicitly incorporates being marginalized into the theory as a predictor, along with economic constraints, of securing decent work. PWT also embeds the construct of marginalization in intersectional theory (Cole, 2009). PWT has been studied with a number of potentially marginalized groups. These include transgender and gender nonconforming adults (Tebbe, Allan, & Bell, 2019), undocumented immigrant young adults (Autin et al., 2018), adults who panhandle (Cadaret et al., 2018), racially and ethnically diverse adults (Duffy et al., 2018), and sexual minorities (Douglass, Velez, Conlin, Duffy, & England, 2017).

Concerns that vocational scholars were focusing their analysis on primarily White middle-class college students have been somewhat replaced by model tests with disparate groups of college and community participants. Previously, studying the career decision-making of college students appeared to make sense at a time when most of the decision-making about future work was made during college years. Blustein pointed out in 2001, though, that this perspective also ignored the entire group of non-college-bound students, roughly 40–50% of the population. Now, though, with changes in the world of work and with work decisions being made and changed throughout the life span, it is important to understand career and work decisions across life stages for both college-bound and non-college-educated individuals. Some methodological advances have enabled this research. The requirement that federally funded data be available after a certain time has allowed researchers to examine longitudinal data that were originally collected for other research questions. For example, Kim, Fouad, Maeda, Xie, and Nazan (2017) did a secondary analysis of longitudinal data collected on midlife adults originally designed to examine work–life balance decisions. In addition, the advances in the availability of crowdsourcing research outlets (e.g., Amazon Mechanical Turk) have allowed vocational psychologists to venture outside traditional college student populations to test model assumptions in a more diverse group of participants. There are limitations to crowdsourcing, as there are for almost all types of data collection, but it does allow researchers to reach populations they could not access before (Chandler & Shapiro, 2016).

The other major advance in vocational psychology research has been the successful pursuit of federal funding, including from the National Science Foundation, the Institute for Educational Sciences, the U.S. Department of Education, and the National Institutes of Health. Some have also received funding from private foundations such as the Spencer or Robert Wood Johnson Foundations. For example, Byars-Winston (2019) has received funding from the National Institute of Health to study mentoring for racial/ethnic minority college students, in an effort to promote their consideration of science and health careers (e.g., Butz, Spencer, Thayer-Hart, Cabrera, & Byars-Winston, 2018). Other vocational psychologists have received funding from the National Science Foundation to research career choices in the area of STEM careers. This funding has allowed researchers to do large-scale theory-based systematic research, including longitudinal research, across genders and racial/ethnic minority populations. Lent and his colleagues (e.g., Lent et al., 2015; Lent et al., 2016; Lent et al., 2013, Lent, Sheu, Gloster, & Wilkins, 2010) have studied engineering students at predominantly White institutions and historically Black universities across several years, finding support for the SCCT. Flores and Navarro and their colleagues (e.g., H. Lee, Flores, Navarro, & Kanagui-Munoz, 2015; Navarro, Flores, Lee, & Gonzalez, 2014; Navarro et al., 2019) used the same theoretical model to study Hispanics and Whites in predominantly White institutions and Latinx serving institutions, also finding support for the model. Fouad and Singh have studied women’s persistence in engineering after graduation from college, also using the SCCT model modified to predict organizational and professional turnover. They found support for the model (Singh et al., 2013) but also found that organizational variables accounted for differences between women who left versus those who stayed in engineering (Fouad, Singh, Cappaert, Chang, & Wan, 2016).

For some of the advances that have been made in the field over the past 18 years, though, there also remain a number of weaknesses in the scholarship identified in 2001. Perhaps the most severe weakness identified by these authors was the insularity of vocational psychology, and that continues to remain true today. Articles that are frequently cited in vocational psychology journals are rarely cited in mainstream psychology journals with a few notable exceptions (e.g., Lent, Brown, & Hackett, 1994). Conversely, mainstream psychology theories are not often integrated into vocational psychology research. Krieshok’s anti-introspectionist perspective on decision-making is an exception to this; he integrated two-system models of decisional thought into his model of career decision-making (Krieshok, Black, & McKay, 2009). For the most part, though, many of the top cited articles in vocational psychology journals are cited primarily in vocational psychology journals, which supports Fouad’s (2001) conclusion that vocational psychologists are talking to other vocational psychologists. In lieu of the broader connections to mainstream psychology, many pages in vocational psychology journals remain full of cross-sectional correlational model testing with constructs developed by and tested by vocational psychologists. On the one hand, by remaining insular, vocational research misses out on advances in psychological theory. On the other hand, insularity means that issues related to work remain outside the realm of other areas of psychology, or worse, that other psychologists are conducting research on work-related questions that are not at all informed by vocational psychology research or theories.

The concern expressed by some of the authors (Savickas, 2001b) in the 2001 issue of JVB regarding the widening gulf between vocational psychology and industrial/organizational psychology continues to be an ongoing weakness in the profession. A recent literature review of articles published in the JVB from 1994 to 2016 using co-citation mapping of topics investigated in JVB identified distinct clusters of research questions related to career choice (vocational psychology) and worker well-being (industrial/organizational psychology) along with a scale development cluster representing the recent developments in the Career Adaptability Scale (Byington, Felps, & Baruch, 2018). Thus, Savickas’s (2001b) comments about the gulf between vocational psychology and industrial/organizational psychology remain prevalent, although career adaptability as a construct is bridging the two worlds, with many scholars studying career adaptability for young adults (Guan et al., 2018) and others studying aspects of career adaptability in older employees (e.g., Fasbender, Wöhrmann, Wang, & Klehe, 2019; Urbanaviciute, Udayar, & Rossier, 2019). But this is an exception. For the most part, theories are developed separately and even similar constructs have different names. An example of this is the definition of a calling, which varies between fields, where calling is conceptualized as a part of meaningful work in one body of literature (Rosso, Dekas, & Wrzesniewski, 2010) but seen as a disparate construct in another (Duffy & Dik, 2013; Lysova, Allan, Dik, Duffy, & Steger, 2019).

Tinsley’s (2001) concern that only certain portions of theories are under investigation also remains an issue. Tinsley cited the many propositions that led to much complexity in the SCCT (Lent et al., 1994), although as we noted earlier, Lent and his colleagues have, in fact, tested the full model. But many other scholars just focus on aspects of the theory, such as on the relationship between self-efficacy and goals or self-efficacy and context. The danger in such studies is that the model proposes reciprocal interactions between such constructs as self-efficacy and outcome expectations, and only studying self-efficacy ignores critical variables that influence it. As a result, outcome expectations have been studied much less frequently, and the predictive power of the entire model is under examined. While we gain some cumulative knowledge about a few constructs, we continue to explain much less variance in career outcomes than we could if the entire model was studied. The more recent PWT (Duffy et al., 2016) is another example of a complicated model with many propositions that may lead to pieces of variables studied rather than the whole model being tested.

Career adaptability (Savickas, 1997, 2013) is another example of isolated constructs being studied rather than a whole theoretical model, although it has been the focus of a good degree of scholarly inquiry. There have been extensive evaluations of the psychometric properties of the Career Adaptability Scale (Savickas & Porfeli, 2012) and a seeming race to incorporate the construct into various vocational theories. Career adaptability was originally described as a replacement to career maturity in Super’s lifespan, lifespace theory (Savickas, 1997) and then was described as a process in the career construction literature (Rudolph, Lavigne & Zacher, 2018; Savickas, 2013). More recently, it has been incorporated into the PWT (Duffy, Blustein, et al., 2016), and a rival process has been proposed vis-à-vis the career self-management model (Lent & Brown, 2013). Based on this, we appear to be more interested in putting a theoretical flag on the construct than we are in investigating how marshaling career resources and confidence operates as part of the decision-making process and adapting to changing environments.

Part of the problem with clarifying the construct of career adaptability centers on confusion as to whether the construct is a psychological process (i.e., measureable trait) or a social construction. It has been defined as both (Hartung & Caderet, 2017; Savickas, 1997, 2013) with the former definition being the one most currently used (Byington, Felps, & Baruch, 2018; Rudolph, Lavigne, & Zacher, 2018). The key issue with defining the construct as a trait is that career adaptability is fundamentally a process variable. It is more accurately described as how individuals react to new and novel information, with the assumption that this occurs over a period of time (Savickas, 1997). This is difficult to measure cross-sectionally, especially if individuals have only been exposed to limited amounts of career exploration or have had to make very few career- or work-related choices. There has been excellent work with this construct done longitudinally (e.g., Negru-Subtirica & Pop, 2016) that is aimed more at understanding the process of career adaptability (see also Johnston, 2018, for a review). The lack of theoretical clarity might serve to obscure the construct in light of other variables in the career construction model rather than elucidate factors that predict an individual’s adaptability to career situations.

Although strides have been made to include more qualitative studies in our literature, the concern about the research rigor in vocational psychology remains largely unchanged. Scholars continue to bemoan poor designs in intervention research (Brown, 2017; Whiston, Li, Mitts, & Wright, 2017; Whiston, Rossier, & Barón, 2017). Fouad’s (2001) concern about research in vocational psychology relying too heavily on correlational research perhaps due to practical concerns remains largely an issue. Without external sources of support, the easiest research to plan is survey research. Trying to systematically study career interventions is hard. Career counseling is often conducted in college offices separate from large university counseling centers that may be set up to facilitate research. The exigencies of university demands on career centers also often preclude a focus on research on their interventions. Research rigor is somewhat improved by recent trends in vocational psychology to adopt more sophisticated modeling techniques. This allows researchers to describe relationships among variables and identify latent constructs through the use of structural equation modeling. In general, these techniques have kept pace with the research trends in psychology as a discipline. This is a definite gain as it broadens the nomological network and clarifies the interrelationships between constructs, allows us to model error in our predictions, and make bolder claims about our models.

The 2001 scholars were concerned about the application of research to practice (Fouad, 2001; Subich, 2001), and the criticism that vocational psychology has surprisingly little to say is still true. There continues to be a lack of research dedicated to explicitly examining career interventions and the career counseling process. For example, Whiston, Rossier, and Barón’s (2017) review of intervention research noted that only two interventions met the IES definition of evidence-based interventions. The IES standards determine what gets included in the Department of Education’s “What Works Clearinghouse.” Strong evidence is based on at least one experimental study, moderate evidence is based on at least one “quasi-experimental” study, and promising evidence is based on at least one correlational study. Thus, only two career interventions are included in the What Works Clearinghouse, diminishing the potential impact of vocational research. Although Whiston, Li, Mitts, and Wright’s (2017) meta-analysis showed counselor support was a key in career choice counseling, the meta-analysis is, by definition, limited to the relatively few studies that have been done in the area. Heppner and Heppner’s (2003) agenda for studying process variables in career counseling remains an ideal—but not followed—way to study what happens in career counseling, and more critically, what to help counselors learn more about what is effective, for whom, and when.

By the same token, scholars in 2001 advocated for using research in vocational psychology to inform public policy (Blustein, 2001; Lent, 2001), which, for the most part, has not happened. Blustein (2008) and Fassinger (2008) laid out clear policy recommendations from vocational research, but they do not appear to have explicitly been implemented. A recent handbook by Solberg and Ali is a promising start to show how career and workforce development research can influence policy. Chapters in the book explicitly address policy implications, and Ali, Flanagan, Pham, and Howard (2017) provide a model for career intervention research and evaluation that can inform policy. Overall, research in vocational psychology has important implications for policies around work–life balance, college retention, and employment practices. For example, some of the recent work in the PWT (Duffy et al., 2016) has clear policy implications for advocating for decent work, defined in terms of safe working conditions, fair pay, working hours that allow for free time, and organizational conditions that allow work–family balance.