اثرات والدین و مدرسه در اکتشاف شغلی دانش آموزان: تجزیه و تحلیل طولی و چند سطحی

The study examines school and parental influences on adolescents' occupational exploration. Analyses of data from 859 6th, 8th, and 10th graders attending high- and lower-track high schools in the German federal state of Thuringia suggested more extensive exploration among students closer to the school-to-work transition. Besides cross-sectional effects of parenting and achievement orientation at school, acceptance and openness students experienced in class predicted increases of their exploratory behaviors. Multilevel analyses showed, however, that school effects operated on the level of subjective perceptions (individual level), but not on the level of intersubjective reality (classroom level). Implications for attempts to foster and facilitate exploration are discussed.

The transition from school to work has been pointed out as a central developmental challenge of adolescence (Havighurst, 1972). Donald Super's (e.g., Super, Savickas, & Super, 1996) work has been a milestone in the field that has widely adopted a developmental perspective on the transition from school to work or postsecondary education. Super pointed to the exploration of own interests and abilities as well as of the opportunities that the world of work offers as the crucial developmental mechanism. Against this backdrop, influences of proximal contexts such as family and school can be assumed to importantly impact adolescents' occupational preparation by way of effects on exploratory activities (Vondracek, Lerner, & Schulenberg, 1986). Meanwhile, particularly with respect to the role of parents quite some evidence has been accumulated that supports these assumptions (Whiston & Keller, 2004). However, the majority of previous empirical studies are based on cross-sectional data and are, thus, inconclusive concerning directions of influences and are vulnerable to the operation of third-variable effects. Moreover, contextual conditions have almost exclusively been captured in terms of individual perceptions. It might well be that the subjective perspective is more decisive in affecting adolescents' exploration than objective conditions. Still, in the lack of studies that allow to disentangle the individual and the contextual level, this remains an open question. Drawing on a longitudinal multilevel data base, the present study sets out to address these issues and to contribute to a better understanding of parent and school effects on adolescent occupational exploration.