Mihaly Csikszentmihalhi - Becoming Adult: How Teenagers Prepare For The World Of Work

IN THE SUMMER OF 1991, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation provided the University of Chicago with a grant to study career formation among adolescents. A research team of Charles Bidwell, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Larry Hedges, and Barbara Schneider designed a national longitudinal study of adolescents in grades six, eight, ten, and twelve. A pilot study was conducted in 19911992, and the full-scale study was launched in the fall of 1992 and continued through 1997. This effort was unusual in that it brought together a diverse academic team of educators, psychologists, and sociologists to think about a problem commonly researched by scholars in career guidance and vocational development. Taking a different approach, the team decided that to understand how young people form ideas about future schooling and work, it is important to consider not only what the adolescents aspirations are but also how they are influenced by family, peer groups, schools, and the communities in which they live. It was assumed that this broad perspective would provide new insights into how todays teenagers think about the future and how much influence others have in helping them formulate their plans.

This is one of very few longitudinal studies of career development involving adolescents. The majority of previous studies on career development were not longitudinal, so it was difficult to ascertain how young peoples career aspirations and ideas of work changed over time. These types of questions were rarely asked of students in middle school, yet we had reason to believe that early experiences with work shaped attitudes and values that could be sustained into adulthood. Our study focused on populations typically under-represented in research on career development. Previous career studies focused primarily on males. With more women entering the labor force and obtaining higher levels of education, we decided to include equal numbers of young women in our sample. Teenagers from low-income families and minority groups were also frequently excluded from previous studies. Therefore, we deliberately sought school populations that would give our sample significant numbers of racial and ethnic minorities and adolescents from low-income families.

We also believed that to understand more about work in the lives of adolescents, we would need to use different methods than those used in more conventional studies of career development. Rather than investigate how personal attributes might predict occupational choice, we wanted to know what conditions enhanced knowledge about different occupations and career interests. To learn more about this we relied on the Experience Sampling Method (ESM) to obtain daily accounts of how students spend their time and how they feel from moment to moment throughout the day. We also created our own Career Orientation Survey (COS) to determine which students had more knowledge about the world of work and what factors seemed to contribute to it. The survey measures job knowledge in unique ways and examines adolescent experiences and activities related to particular job choices. To gain a deeper understanding of the influence of others on career knowledge, we also developed a peer sociometric questionnaire that identified whom adolescents relied on for advice about their futures.

This book describes the experiences of adolescents as they were reported in the first few years of data collection. Longitudinal data on the base-year high school graduates are used to examine the association between high school experiences and student decisions to enter postsecondary school or the labor force. Through interviews, surveys, time diaries, and other data sources, a picture emerges of how adolescents spend their time, how they feel about their relationships with their parents and friends, and what images they have of work and their future lives.