Millicent E. Poole

Tracks and transitions-A comparison of adolescent future-oriented goals, explorations, and commitments in australia, israel, and finland

Abstract It has been suggested that age-related normative demands and institutional tracks play an important role in the development of adolescent future orientation, identity explorations, and Commitments. In order to study this, 71 Australian boys and 49 girls, 23 Israeli boys and 23 girls, and 36 Finnish boys and 66 girls aged between 16 and 17 were investigated. They filled in the Hopes and Fears Questionnaire measuring the content and temporal extension of goals, and the Exploration and Commitment Inventory. The results showed that developmental tasks, role transitions, and institutional tracks play an important role in the development of adolescent future orientation, explorations, and commitments. Due to earlier school transitions, Australian adolescents expected that their hopes related to education and work, and education-related concerns, would be realized earlier than Finnish and Israeli youths. In turn, because of military service commitments of several years, Israeli youths expected that both...

Age differences in adolescent future-oriented goals, concerns, and related temporal extension in different sociocultural contexts

The aim of this study was to investigate the extent to which differences in agegraded sociocultural contexts influence adolescent future-oriented goals, concerns, and related temporal extension. Ninety-five 13–14-year-old Australian boys and 104 girls, 87 16–17-year-old Australian boys and 81 girls, 67 13–14-year-old Finnish boys and 86 girls, and 56 16–17-year-old Finnish boys and 107 girls were investigated. Half of the subjects in each group came from an urban environment and half from rural regions. The subjects filled in the Hopes and Fears Questionnaire measuring the content and temporal extension of goals and concerns. Overall, the results showed that adolescent goals, concerns, and related temporal extension reflected the major developmental tasks of their own age and early adulthood. However, interesting cross-cultural, gender, and urban rural differences were also found, reflecting variation in societal options and cultural values. For example, Australians were more interested in leisure and more concerned about their own health and global issues. Later school transitions meant that in older age groups the Finnish adolescents expected goals related to their future education and occupation to be actualized later than Australian youths did. Because of a lack of career options, interest in a future occupation decreased with age among adolescents living in rural regions.

Social Class—Sex Contrasts in Patterns of Cognitive Style

Ninety-six adolescents, aged between fifteen and sixteen, and drawn from contrasted social class and sex groups, were administered a battery of cognitive style tests. It was hypothesized, largely on the basis of socialization theory, that different patterns of intellectual functioning would be apparent. The results indicated that middle-class boys exhibited a cognitive style that was differentiating, analytic and flexible; middle-class girls one that was creative, inferential, high on psychological concepts but low on category estimation; working-class boys and girls displayed little differentiation, categorizing flexibility, or creativity but revealed a marked preference for inferential and physical concepts.

Conflict in Women’s Decision-making About Multiple Roles

SynopsisThe purpose of the present study is to present a conceptual map of the different patterns of relationships between work and private lives and address the serious dilemmas and tensions in coping with the public work - private personal interface. Previous research in this area suggests that a major concern of professional occupational groups is precisely the relationship between these two worlds. The paper highlights the complex processes involved in women’s role choices. Using results from qualitative interviews conducted with 36 women aged 27, about their past and present work and family experiences, an adaptation of a typology by Evans & Bartolome (1984) is used to explain the different role constraints faced by women over time. The adapted typology is incorporated within the Krumboltz (1984) decision-making theory to illuminate the problematic nature of the work-family relationship.

Career Orientations in Women from Rural and Urban Backgrounds

This study examines career orientations in women from rural and urban backgrounds, using a longitudinal data set collected over a period of 10 years, from 1973-1982. When first contacted, respondents were 18 years of age. The final data collection in 1982 resulted in a sample of some 1300 women. The longitudinal data was analyzed using LISREL structural equation modeling and was guided by a theoretical framework developed by Krumboltz (1981), which focuses on the process of decision-making. The theory attempts to explain how educational and occupational preferences and skills are acquired and how selections of courses, occupations and fields of work are made and identifies the interactions of genetic factors, environmental conditions, learning experiences, cognitive and emotional responses, and performance skills that produce movement along one career path or another. Results from the study found that there were some differences between women of contrasting geographic background over the secondary school-early career development stage. Noticeably larger differences occurred in values found for rural women in the effect of external constraints on early work satisfaction, the stability of work satisfaction, the effect of work satisfaction on occupational interest and the effect of parental status on career orientation

Reviewing for Research Excellence: Expectations, Procedures and Outcomes.

This paper describes the process by which the Humanities and Social Sciences Panel of the Australian Research Council (ARC) gives effect to the principle of funding ‘research excellence’. A member of this Panel for four years, the author provides an account of the ARC Research Allocation Policy, what criteria assessors are asked to use in judging each research grant application, and the quality controls operating within the system. Peer review is identified as the central element in assessing the excellence of the research proposal, the possibility of a significant conceptual advance and the quality of the researcher(s). Particular comment is made about the success of educational researchers in obtaining ARC funds for research and implications for the future.

Training in Information Selection for Communication

An analysis of communication difficulties experienced by Australian children of lower socio-economic status and/or immigrant background led to the development of a program aimed at helping children in the age range 8–12 years develop linguistic selection rules necessary for effective information transfer and processing. The tasks were designed so that children were required to communicate through an opaque partition and, in turn, take the role of speaker and listener in communicating information about especially designed sets of objects and constructions. Evaluation of the materials and procedures was carried out in two metropolitan schools using a set of pretests and posttests. It was concluded that use of the materials for a period of one half day per week for nine weeks resulted in substantial gains, when compared with control groups, at two grade levels, in the childrens encoding skills.

Relationships between Verbal and Non-Verbal Abilities for Migrant Children and Australian Children of Low Socio-Economic Status: Similarities and Contrasts

Previous research indicates that mean patterns of mental ability show striking differences between different ethnic groups. In this paper, some salient features of information processing on which there are likely to be differences between children of Australian born parents of low SES and children of migrant parents are discussed. An empirical study of these differences is described. The mean performance of the migrant children studied compared with children of low SES Australian born parents was found to be related to the balance between verbal and cognitive aspects of the task. The greater the cognitive demand for a given verbal requirement the better the performance of the migrant children relative to the children in the “Australian” group. Further, the intercorrelations between performances were found to be markedly different for the two groups. The results suggest that migrant children in particular may benefit from teaching which emphasises the pragmatic use of language to indicate desired discriminations and concepts.

Social Class Differences in Language Predictability: Written

Two cloze-tests were constructed from written essays encoded by 80 first-year university students of middle-class and working-class origin. In a second experimental situation, 46 tertiary subjects were asked to ‘fill in’ the missing cloze deletions of these written passages. Within the terms of the Bernstein elaborated-restricted code framework it was posited that, since working class language is thought to be characterized by greater lexical and structural predictability, these passages would facilitate the decoding task. The analysis was based firstly on a ‘verbatim’ cloze completion criterion and secondly utilized an information theory approach. Results on the first criterion indicated significant social class differences (higher predictability of working-class messages on lexical and total cloze deletions); whereas those on the second criterion were nonsignificant. Possible implications of the study for teaching were explored.

Role Reward and Role Stress in Managerial and Professional Women

The importance of balancing personal and work demands has become increasingly relevant in recent years as large numbers of women move into the labour market full time. The present study was designed to examine differences in role rewards and stress amongst a group of 163 managerial and professional women. Subjects completed a questionnaire about the stress and rewards associated with their work and family roles. Although no significant differences were found between managerial and professional women, the mean scores indicated the role of employee is both the most rewarding and the most stressful. Findings are discussed in terms of sample occupation and changing home-work patterns.