Faculty of Education
Department of Educational Psychology
Selected Highlights from Research Findings
A new social arrangement of work poses a series of questions and challenges that individuals who work in global economies must address. Life-design counselling is a concept that integrates the process of career construction and self-constructing with the unique factors that play a role in an individual’s life at a specific time and in a specific context and describe vocational behaviour and its development. Career and self-construction are characterised by the intentional integration of and the simultaneous focus on personality characteristics, developmental processes and individual stories and are therefore still related to the overall fitting of individual characteristics with possible careers. The framework for life designing is therefore structured to facilitate strategies that are life-long, holistic, contextual, and preventive.
In the first part of the project, four of my students and I dealt with the model of career adaptability and the methods of life-design counselling in SA. We used both quantitative and qualitative research to describe and explore the meaning and measurement of career adaptability. We intended to describe the impact of life-design counselling on adolescents from all population groups in SA. Each of the studies used a brief biographical questionnaire and the Career Adapt-Abilities Inventory.
In the second part of the project, some international colleagues, my students and I are involved in the standardization of the Career-Adaptabilies Inventory, Career Interest Profile, as well as the restandardisation of the Rothwell-Miller Interest Blank (I have been granted permission to do so by the publisher).
The broad aim of the research is to develop a brief, combined qualitative-quantitative strategy to facilitate state-of-the-art career counselling and career construction counseling for life designing for all learners in SA and to point out that career counselling entails a process of counselling that empowers the client to give meaning to the counselling process. The narrative for career counselling, which will be used at these schools, could then serve as a blueprint for other schools in the country
Contact person: Prof JG Maree.
STAR explores how teachers in schools function as resources to buoy resilience in the face of HIV&AIDS-compounded adversities. We draw on participatory reflection and action data from a longitudinal study with teachers (n=57, 5 male, 52 female) from six schools in three South African provinces. The study tracks teachers’ psychosocial support following their participation in STAR (Supportive Teachers, Assets and Resilience). Verbatim interview transcriptions were thematically analysed. Following thematic analysis three themes (as well as sub-themes and categories) emerged: firstly teachers use resources to promote resilience in schools (teachers use: (a) systems to identify and refer vulnerable cases, and (b) neighbourhood health and social development services), secondly teachers form partnerships to promote resilience in schools (teacher-partnerships include: (a) children and families, (b) community volunteers, and (c) community organisations, businesses and government), and lastly vulnerable individuals using offered school-based support (using (a) vegetable gardens, (b) emotional and health support, and (c) capacity development opportunities). We conclude that teachers can promote resilience in schools by establishing networks with service providers that function across systems to support vulnerable groups. We theorise that the core of systemic networks are relationships, that relationship-driven support networks mediate the effects of cumulative risk, and school-based networks can enable schools to function as resilience-promoting resources
Contact person: Prof L Ebersöhn.
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