Abstract
Social scientists have focused their attention on the period of adolescence as critical for socioeconomic attainment and vocational development. While much is known about how youth develop orientations toward future work during adolescence, there has been little systematic study of the psychological orientations and behaviors during the post-adolescent period that foster long-term success and fulfillment in the world of work. Using data from the Youth Development Study, we found that those who exhibited psychological orientations and behaviors indicative of agentic striving from age 18 to 31 – maintaining high aspirations and certainty over career goals, and engaging in multiple job search activities – had jobs in early adulthood that offered higher socioeconomic status and more intrinsic rewards. The advantage of the most agentic, in comparison to the least agentic youth, with respect to intrinsic rewards and self-direction, are attributed to their higher levels of education, but the most agentic youth had higher levels of occupational attainment, even when their educational attainments were controlled. The flexibly agentic were quite similar to the most agentic in their ability to attain jobs characterized by high levels of self-direction. We thus find that agentic striving in the post-high school period matters both for long-term occupational attainment and for contemporary youth’s capacity to obtain high quality adult work experiences.
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Notes
- 1.
While estimation of latent agentic paths includes all 1,010 respondents due to the model’s ability to handle missing data directly in the estimation procedure, analyses of occupational outcomes are limited to 518 cases reporting employment and occupational characteristics in the 2005 survey (no imputation of 2005 missing data was conducted). Despite this discrepancy, we believe this strategy is justified because each pathway assignment depends on the similarity between each respondent’s own data across time and the empirical patterns represented by the pathways. In supplemental analysis not shown but available from the authors upon request, we used inverse proportional weighting (Scharfstein et al. 1999) to assess whether our findings are influenced by patterns of missing data due to panel attrition. All inferential conclusions presented in Tables 6.3, 6.4, 6.5, and 6.6 remained the same.
- 2.
According to the tolerance and variance inflation factor (VIF) collinearity statistics, mutlicollinearity does not appear problematic. For each coefficient across all the models presented, the lowest tolerance was .345 and the highest VIF was 2.899. These values are far from the typical problematic cutoffs of less than .10 for the tolerance and greater than 10 for the VIF.
- 3.
In unlisted models, we included measures from adolescence capturing depressive affect, self-efficacy, intrinsic motivation to school, intrinsic work rewards, school problem behavior, time spent in extracurricular activities, and age. None of these measures were statistically significant in predicting the adult work outcomes and thus were not included in the final models.
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Acknowledgments
The Youth Development Study is supported by a grant, “Work Experience and Mental Health: A Panel Study of Youth,” from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (HD44138). It was previously supported by the National Institute of Mental Health (MH42843). Jeremy Staff is grateful for support from a Mentored Research Scientist Development Award in Population Research from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (HD054467). The findings and conclusions in this report are those of the authors and do not represent the views of the sponsors.
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Mortimer, J.T., Vuolo, M., Staff, J. (2014). Agentic Pathways Toward Fulfillment in Work. In: Keller, A., Samuel, R., Bergman, M., Semmer, N. (eds) Psychological, Educational, and Sociological Perspectives on Success and Well-Being in Career Development. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8911-0_6
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