Paul J. Hartung

Career Construction and Subjective Well-Being

Experienced happiness and reported life contentment represent cardinal elements of subjective well-being (SWB). Achieving happiness and contentment with work and other domains, such as love, play, and community, constitute fundamental life goals. Career construction offers a developmental theory of vocational behavior and a career assessment and counseling model counselors can use to promote client SWB. As an intervention model, career construction assists individuals with using work to foster self-completion and derive meaning, satisfaction, and happiness as they design their lives. Career construction counseling promotes SWB because its aims are consistent with increasing both immediate life satisfaction and overall life contentment. The present analysis describes the basic principles and practice of career construction and explains the career style interview as an assessment and counseling method useful for assisting individuals to identify and pursue self-selected goals and projects, endeavors that contribute to SWB.

Personality, Vocational Interests, and Work Values of Medical Students

Interests, personality, and values figure prominently in work motivation, yet little research has examined the combined influence of these factors on vocational behavior. The present study therefore examined relationships among these variables in a sample of 282 medical students (169 women, 113 men) who responded to the Strong Interest Inventory, NEO Personality Inventory—Revised, and the Physician Values in Practice Scale. Supporting prior research, results indicated significant relationships between openness and artistic interests and between extraversion and enterprising interests, social interests, and management work values. Regression analyses indicated that personality and vocational interests predicted between 2% and 14% of the variance in each of six work values measured. Personality traits and vocational interests appear to play a meaningful, albeit limited, role in determining work values.

Barrier or Benefit? Emotion in Life-Career Design:

Emotion permeates human life, yet receives little attention in career theory and intervention. Long seen as a barrier to avoid, recent conceptual and empirical work indicate that emotion benefits human behavior and development. Advances in the interdisciplinary science of emotion support examining the construct across differential, developmental, and social cognitive career traditions. The subjective, phenomenological, and socially constructed nature of emotion particularly suits career theory and intervention’s increasing emphases on postmodernism, constructivism, and social constructionism; implicating emotion as of principal benefit to self-construction in work and other life domains. In this regard, emotion figures prominently in motivational processes related to early memory narratives within career construction counseling and the intentionality process of life— career design. Considering emotion in life—career design may help complement vocational psychology’s long-standing foci on answering questions of what occupations people choose and how ready they are to choose them with addressing the question of why people move along particular life— career pathways.

Stability of values during medical school

Background: Medical students’ values represent an understudied area of research in medical education research. No known studies have investigated how medical students’ values change over time from matriculation to graduation. Aim: Values are thought to remain relatively stable over the life course. However, little research supports this claim. Therefore, we examined the extent to which values change or remain the same during medical school. Method: Forty-six first-year medical students completed the Physician Values in Practice Scale (PVIPS) during their first and fourth years of medical school. The PVIPS contains 38 statements of values about medical practice and comprises six scales: Prestige, Service, Autonomy, Lifestyle, Management, and Scholarly Pursuits. Results: Matched pair t-tests (p < 0.05) indicated significant differences between students’ PVIPS scores pretest (first year of medical school) and posttest (fourth year of medical school) for 2 of the 6 values (Autonomy: t(45) = −4.12, p < 0.001 and Lifestyle: t(45) = −2.62, p = 0.012). Conclusions: Medical students values appear to change slightly during their 4 years of medical education. In line with literature suggesting that the medical education process is associated with change in certain student qualities and attributes (e.g., empathy), physician values may be another variable so affected.

The Physician Values in Practice Scale-Short Form: Development and Initial Validation

The authors conducted two studies to develop and test a short form of the 60-item Physician Values in Practice Scale (PVIPS). The PVIPS, which draws on the theory of work adjustment for its theoretical base, measures personal values specific to medical occupations. In Study 1, 217 first- and final-year medical students completed a Web-based survey. Item analysis and exploratory factor analysis reduced the original PVIPS 60 items to 30. Validity was tested by examining the interfactor correlations among and between the 60-item and 30-item subscales and by examining bivariate correlations with gender and personality. In Study 2, a second sample of 316 first-year medical students responded to the 30-item shortened form. Confirmatory factor analysis confirmed 6 subscales measuring the same core values of prestige, service, autonomy, lifestyle, management, and scholarly pursuits that were assessed by the original 60-item version.