The Outcomes of Vocational Interventions

Abstract

The purposes of this article are to (a) summarize the status of career intervention research since Spokane and Oliver’s seminal meta-analysis of vocational intervention outcome and (b) discuss in more detail a recently proposed method for determining whether career interventions make a difference in the lives of clients (clinical significance). Although several excellent meta-analyses of the career intervention outcome literature have appeared since 1983, we briefly summarize the meta-analytic results, discuss future research directions that were suggested by the meta-analyses, and evaluate our progress in addressing suggestions. The bulk of the article focuses on summarizing how clinical significance of career outcomes can be addressed, presenting normative data that can be used to address clinical significance questions with several widely used outcome measures, and illustrating clinical significance calculations using published career intervention studies.