WEEK 2 - OBSERVATIONAL ERA OF CAREER COUNSELING

Week 2 - January 26th
Operational Era of Career Counseling

Crites  (1969) identified three broad overlapping eras to describe the evolution of career and development theory building which are:  Observational, Empirical, and Theoretical.

Name of Theory:  Operational Era (Crites 1st era)

Dates:  late 1800s - mid 1920's

Theorist:  Frank Parsons - dominant visionary and architect of vocational guidance during this period

Main Concept/Ideas:
From the mid-1800s into the early years of the 1900s, the United States was involved in the Industrial Revolution (new manufacturing process transitioning from hand production methods to machines with textiles being the dominant industry).  It was a period of rapid industrial growth, social protest, social reform, and utopian idealism.  Social protest and social reform were being carried out under the Progressive Movement which sought to change negative conditions associated with the Industrial Revolution.  Vocational guidance was born during the height of the Progressive Movement as "but one manifestation of the broader movement of progressive reform which occurred in this country in the late 19th and early 20th centuries."

During the early part of the period, efforts to provide vocational guidance to individuals were sponsored by the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) and by individuals such as Lysander Richards, who published his book, Vocophy:  The New Profession in 1881.  Other practitioners, Savickas and Baker, used phrenology (detailed study of the size and shape of the cranium as a supposed indication of character and mental abilities), physiognomy (a person's facial features or expressions, especially when regarded as indicative of character or ethnic origin), and palmistry (claim of characterization and foretelling the future through the study of the palm) in their vocational guidance.  These pseudoscience (beliefs or practices mistakenly regarded as being based on scientific method) techniques recognized individual differences but assessed their meaning by measuring crania, facial features, and body shapes.  These techniques were discredited  as more scientific approaches to vocational guidance were being developed and used.

The foundation for vocational guidance as we know it today was laid by a number of individuals and institutions in the early 1900s.  Frank Parsons has been identified as "the dominant visionary and architect of vocational guidance."  He opened the Vocational Bureau in a settlement home called the Civic Service House in January 1908 and used the term vocational guidance for the first time.  In 1908, he published a book, Choosing a Vocation, in which he described this three-step approach, giving vocational guidance "it's status as a science."

Parsons three-step approach in choosing a wise vocation stated that there are three broad factors 1) a clear understanding of yourself, your aptitudes, interests, ambitions, resources, limitations, and their causes; 2) a knowledge of the requirements and conditions of success, advantages, and disadvantages, compensation, opportunities, and prospects in different lines of work; and 3) true reasoning of the relations of these two groups of facts.

To carry out the three-step approach, Parsons depended "on self-analysis by the candidate himself, shrewd intuition on the part of the counselor, and physiognomatic (science of deducing mental character from physical appearance) observations.   His methods involved seven steps:  Personal Data, Self-Analysis, The Person's Own Choice and Decision, Counselor's Analysis, Outlook on the Vocational Field, Induction and Advice, and General Helpfulness in Fitting in the Chosen Work.  He began relying on the new field of testing to measure mental capacities.  Hugo Munsterberg, director of the Harvard Psychology Laboratory, tested Vocational Bureau clients using mental tests.  

The use of these mental tests spread rapidly in the 1910s and were used by James Cottell, Hugo Munsterberg, and H.L. Hollinworth as they were advocates who urged the use of these tests.  The first large-scale administration of paper-and-pencil tests of intelligence were the Army Alpha and Beta tests occurred when the United States entered World War I.  Following the war, these increasingly used in schools and industry.

Links to Articles or Videos:  http://lifestyleandcareerdevelopment.blogspot.com/2008/10/trait-and-factor-theory.html