Contextual supports and barriers to career choice: A social cognitive analysis.

Abstract

Summary The foregoing review of the career barriers literaturepresents a mixed picture. On the one hand, students andworkers do perceive barriers to their career progress; but onthe other hand, barrier ratings are often found to besomewhat modest in size and have not been shown to beconsistently related to important career outcome or processvariables in the mostly student samples in which they havebeen studied. This is not to say that barriers are notconsequential for many Individuals. Indeed, they are likelyto be especially salient for those who have been victimizedby various forms of oppression. However, several concep-tual and methodological issues—such as the manner inwhich barriers have been defined, failure to consider thecontext and temporal specificity of barriers, noncorrespon-dence between barriers and outcome criteria (in terms ofcontent and developmental task), infrequent attention tomediating and moderating variables, understudy of nonstu-dent samples, and use of designs that do not explorepotential causal effects of barriers—may have partly ob-scured the impact of perceived barriers and the mechanismsthrough which they affect career behavior.Despite these considerations, recent career barriers re-search has constructed an important conceptual and method-ological foundation for further inquiry, and the program-matic research of Swanson, McWhirter, and Luzzo and theircolleagues has been particularly pivotal. In the remainder ofthis article, we attempt to build on this foundation, offering amodest set of suggestions for future research on careerbarriers and their conceptual partner, career supports. Thesesuggestions are premised on the need to clarify or elaboratecertain aspects of SCCT having relevance for the conceptu-alization and assessment of contextual variables.