Career decision-making difficulties among career-decided college students

The procedures developed by Gati and colleagues to interpret scores in the Career Decision Difficulties Questionnaire were implemented to examine difficulties’ profiles among self-identified decided college students who reported being either comfortable or uncomfortable with their career choice. Of the 583 participants, 92.5% were career decided and 7.5% were undecided. Close to half (47.2%) of the career-decided students self-identified as uncomfortable with their career choice and reported similar career decision-making difficulties as their undecided peers. The most salient difficulties among decided uncomfortable students were general indecisiveness and lack of knowledge regarding occupations and the decision-making process. Greater difficulties related to lack of knowledge about oneself, and internal conflicts predicted membership in the decided uncomfortable group versus the decided comfortable group. Results indicated that career-decided students are not a homogenous group. Implications of the findings for career counseling with decided uncomfortable college students are discussed.     

Influence of gender self-schema and type of service-oriented NGOs on volunteering activity / Influencia del autoesquema de género y del tipo de servicios de las ONG en las actividades de voluntariado

The feminization of service-oriented NGOs on volunteering needs to consider gender differences when exploring the system of volunteer motivations. This study examines the relationship of these motivations with gender self-schema and type of service-oriented NGOs. For this purpose, 160 volunteers from 21 Spanish NGOs completed a questionnaire. The results show that, once the effect of time spent volunteering was removed, there was a significant effect of gender self-schema in relation to motivation and there was a significant interaction effect between gender self-schema and type of NGO. Specifically, masculine volunteers were less motivated than feminine, androgynous and undifferentiated persons. Also, masculine people working with the elderly were the least motivated volunteers and androgynous people working in service-oriented NGOs dedicated to children and adolescents were the most motivated individuals. The results indicate the relevance of androgyny in understanding volunteering, as well as the importance of promoting non-sexist educational proposals to increase men’s participation in these activities.     

Careers in a Cultural Context

This article gives an overview of research on Super's theory across cultures within the United States as well as internationally. Research indicates that the theory has some cross-cultural validity, yet there seem to be measurement concerns. The article also discusses two areas for future investigation: development of ethnic identity as a vocational task and research on developmental contextualism (Vondracek, Lerner, & Shulenberg, 1986).     

Poisson-Driven Stationary Markov Models

ABSTRACT

We propose a simple yet powerful method to construct strictly stationary Markovian models with given but arbitrary invariant distributions. The idea is based on a Poisson-type transform modulating the dependence structure in the model. An appealing feature of our approach is the possibility to control the underlying transition probabilities and, therefore, incorporate them within standard estimation methods. Given the resulting representation of the transition density, a Gibbs sampler algorithm based on the slice method is proposed and implemented. In the discrete-time case, special attention is placed to the class of generalized inverse Gaussian distributions. In the continuous case, we first provide a brief treatment of the class of gamma distributions, and then extend it to cover other invariant distributions, such as the generalized extreme value class. The proposed approach and estimation algorithm are illustrated with real financial datasets. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.     

Book reviews

Actes du Ier Congrès Mondial de Sociologie du Théâtre, Bulzoni, Roma, 1988.

Miroslawa Marody and Antoni Sulek (eds.) Rzeczywistosc Polska i Sposoby Radzenia Sobie z Nia (Polish Reality and Various Ways of Dealing with It), Warsaw, institute of Sociology, University of Warsaw, 1987, pp. 271.

Roberto Cipriani, Il Cristo Rosso. Riti e simboli, religione e politica nella cultura popolare (The Red Christ. Rites and Symbols, Religion and Politics in Popular Culture). With a foreword by Emile Poulat, Roma, Ianua, 1985, pp.XXI, 245.

Richard H. Hall, Organizations, Structures, Processes and Outcomes (4th ed.) Englewood Cliffs, Prentice Hall, 1987, pp.X, 358.

Jahrbücher für Soziologie und Sozialpolitik (Yearbooks for Sociology and Social Policy), Berlin, (D.D.R). Akademie Verlag, 1980–1986.

Shimpo, Mitsuro and Sonoko Matsuda Gendai Nihon Noson Shakai no Hendo (Degradation of a Farming Community in Japan: Mechanization and Individuation), Tokyo, Ochanomizu Shobo, 1986.     

Health related quality of life of women at the sixth week and sixth month postpartum by mode of birth

Background

Health-related quality of life of women in the postpartum period may depend on the mode of birth. However, previous findings are contradictory.

Prodigal daughters: portraying lesbians in Hispanic Caribbean cinema

During the last twenty years, Hispanic Caribbean cinema has slowly developed roles to represent lesbians. In order to draw a conceptual map and to examine the un/successfulness of this new lesbian "public image," I analyze both independent films that challenge the status quo by portraying openly lesbian characters and mainstream films that insist on denying autonomy to same-sex love. Whereas commercial markets may deem an openly lesbian role transgressive, queer female roles can be considered "appropriate." Gender-queering functions as a symbolically transitional stage toward lesbian visibility and inclusion.     

Practice and Research in Career Counseling and Development—1999

This article reviews the career literature published in 1999 that focused on issues related to the identification and implementation of career choices. The discussion was organized in 3 major areas: publications related to theoretical approaches, new assessment instruments, and career interventions and programs.     

The Portuguese Republic

The findings and recommendations of researchers and specialists in thinking-skill learning and teaching have important implications for classroom efforts to improve student thinking. This summary identifies various types of thinking skills and skill components recommended for classroom instruction. The author describes and cites research-derived features of effective, direct instruction in thinking skills and describes a framework for this instruction. He also describes researcherand specialist-recommended teaching techniques and lesson strategies for introducing any thinking skill, guiding continuing skill practice, and teaching students to transfer thinking skills to other contexts. He presents researcher recommendations of when, where, and why such direct skill instruction can be effectively provided. The research cited here suggests both students' academic achievement and their quality of thinking can be improved by using these techniques and strategies to teach thinking skills in subject-matter courses.