Evaluation of a Career Development Skills Intervention With Adolescents Living in an Inner City
✍ Scribed by Sherri L. Turner; Julia L. Conkel
- Publisher
- American Counseling Association
- Year
- 2010
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 129 KB
- Volume
- 88
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1556-6678
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Researchers have suggested that adolescents who live in an inner city face multiple career development barriers related to their entry into the occupational world (National Research Council, 1993), with greater challenges and fewer resources than adolescents from other segments of society (Luzzo & McWhirter, 2001;McWhirter, 1997). Youth who live in an inner city often have lower levels of educational attainment (e.g., high school graduation rates of approximately 50% in some cities), less work experience, and a greater risk of facing underemployment after leaving high school (Kasarda & Ting, 1996). Moreover, unemployment is growing in the inner cities, with widening wage and opportunity gaps between innercity residents from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and suburban residents from higher socioeconomic backgrounds (Bynner & Parsons, 2002;Kasarda & Ting, 1996). Indeed, moderate wage employment opportunities are seldom available to inner-city residents, who are typically segregated in location due in large part to their economic, racial, and ethnic minority statuses (Teitz, 1998). These realities highlight the critical need for effective career development services for young people who live in inner cities as they are confronted with quickly changing career options that have been affected by economic globalization and technological, industrial, and organizational reforms (Teitz, 1998).
Researchers have suggested that using a model that does not address the unique contexts that have an effect on career development, such as race, culture, or socioeconomic barriers, may not adequately prepare diverse adolescents to successfully confront career challenges (Byars-Winston & Fouad, 2006;Savickas, 2000). "The assumed equality of vocational opportunity and freedom of career choice for most people are among the assumptions that characterize traditional career theory, research, and practice" (Byars-Winston & Fouad, 2006, p. 188). Thus, a career counseling model that focuses solely on more traditional career counseling activities, such as exploration, person-environment fit, and goal setting, may