Mary Sue Richardson

Work in people's lives: A location for counseling psychologists.

The career development-vocational psychology literature has been marked by 2 persistent problems: a slow response to new developments in basic areas of psychology, such as developmental psychology, and a lack of representation of populations other than White and middle-class groups as research participants or as foci of theoretical explanation. After a brief discussion of 2 factors that may have contributed to these problems, a rational for a new location for this field is developed.

Counseling for Work and Relationship

Counseling for work and relationship is a social constructionist perspective, informed by feminist and social justice values, and responsive to radical changes in contemporary lives, that fosters a shift in vocational psychology from helping people develop careers to helping people construct lives through work and relationship. The first and major proposition of this perspective is a new discourse for describing the construction of lives that specifies four major social contexts through which people construct lives. These social contexts are market work, personal care work, personal relationships, and market work relationships. Additional propositions of the counseling for work and relationship perspective are the centrality of narrative theory for understanding how lives are constructed and agentic action as a critical process in constructing lives. Implications for research, intervention, and training are considered.

The dimensions of career and work orientation in college women

Abstract The purpose of this study was to clarify the meaning of the construct, career orientation. Fourteen presumed measures of career orientation as well as Supers Work Values Inventory were administered to college women. Analysis of the relationships among these variables identified two relatively independent clusters. The first cluster most closely approximated the usual definition of career orientation. Career-oriented women were found to be highly career motivated and perceived the career role as primary in their adult lives. The second cluster was called work orientation. This orientation characterized women with well-defined occupational aspirations who placed a high value on both the career role and marriage-family responsibilities in their future. Work-oriented women tended to choose traditionally feminine occupations in contrast to the career-oriented women whose aspirations included higher level and less traditional occupations.

Mothering: The view from psychological research

The study of mothering in the psychological literature reflects, first, the absence of and, then, the impact of feminist consciousness in the discipline. As Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English note, mothers at the turn of the century were viewed as technical experts whose marketable product was an adjusted and achieving child. In fact, until fairly recently research on mothering focused on the relationship of child-rearing practices to the developing abilities of children. Within the last decade, however, a revolution has occurred in the psychological literature. Along with studies investigating the effect of sex bias on socialization and psychotherapeutic practice, there has emerged an interest in the major life experiences that differentiate the lives of men and women. As gender has been separated politically from role expectations, psychologists have begun to look at the factors that motivate some women more than others to want children, and at the satisfaction and dissatisfaction women derive from mothering. Two other shifts have also affected the study of mothering. First, the development of a life-course approach, including emphasis on historical and social changes that occur over the course of an individuals

A Critique of Career Discourse Practices

The social constructionist lens was conceived originally by philosophers to heal the split between personal experience and the social world, a split that can be traced to the influence of Descartes on Western thought (Rorty, 1999). This lens has been very influential in the social sciences. It opens our eyes to the diverse ways in which our experience, our individual subjectivity, is shaped and co-constructed by the social worlds that we inhabit.

Counseling Psychology Training Data and Perceptions

A national survey of counseling psychology training programs indicates the increasing significance of American Psychological Association approval status and the changing nature of the job market for recent graduates. Most programs are active and expanding.

New Perspectives for Counseling Psychologists

This set of articles on the interface of work and relationship in people’s lives can be read in three ways, each of which leads to new perspectives for the professional practice of counseling psychologists. Practice in this article refers to the professional activities of counseling psychologists relevant to theory, research, and intervention. First, these articles provide a conceptual framework and research base that establishes the significance of this interface as a major focus of practice. Second, they can be read as occupying a transitional space between old and new ways of construing the field of career development and vocational behavior. Third, the two interview-based research articles represent interesting case studies in the movement toward the acceptance and use of qualitative research design and methods. This discussion addresses each of these readings. My aim is to encourage a further shift in the direction of the new perspectives that are identified.

Onset of Parenting and Stressful Events.

The purpose of this study was to develop a list of stressful events associated with onset of parenting, and to rank the events and establish weights in a way that reflects the degree of disruption that would be caused should that event occur. Whether the rankings and weightings differ as a function of parent sex and maternal work status was also considered. The procedures for developing the list and the rankings and weightings are presented. Results indicate high internal consistency in weightings (.81 to .92) and significant differences in ranking between the four groups of parents (nonworking mothers, working mothers, fathers with nonworking wives, fathers with working wives) on two of the 21 events. Implications for parent education programs and research are discussed.

The Ongoing Social Construction of the Counseling for Work and Relationship Perspective

This rejoinder to the three reactions papers by Blustein (2012), Byars-Winston (2012), and Lent (2012) focuses first on the issue of what is old and what is new about the counseling for work and relationship perspective. This includes the issue of holism, the influence of contextualism, and the designation of new categories and a new discourse for the major contexts of lives. I also elaborate on the meaning of care work and how the boundaries of this perspective might be extended to more fully respond to social justice concerns.

Expanding the Discourse

In this chapter we propose a dual model of working as a conceptual lens through which to examine women’s (and men’s) working lives (Richardson & Schaeffer, in press). This dual model encompasses market or paid work in the market economy and unpaid care work in personal lives that includes care of persons (including the self), of relationships, of communities and organisations, and of the physical world (Tronto, 2009).