고학력 여성의 경력단절 경험 연구

Abstract

Objectives The present study aims at understanding the meaning and nature of the traumatic experience that highly educated women experience from career interruption.
 Methods To do this, in-depth interviews were conducted with 7 highly educated women with traumatic experience due to career interruption, and the essential meaning of the experience was analyzed by Colaizzi’s phenomenological method.
 Results As a result of the study, 66 formulated meanings, 26 themes, 5 theme clusters were derived. The 7 theme clusters appeared as ‘entering into career interruption’, ‘types of loss’, ‘emotion resulting from loss’, ‘maladaptive response to loss’, and ‘protective factors against loss’.
 Conclusions To summarize the findings, career interruption was experienced as various losses beyond just ‘loss of job’ among highly educated women, whose main losses were psychological losses derived from ‘loss of identity’, ‘loss of their goal’ and ‘loss of economic power’. The experience of loss was a suppressed form of sadness for “lost,” taking the form of “disenfranchised grief”, which was not supported or recognized by the surroundings. In addition, psychological loss had difficulty in their mourning process because the object of loss was abstract and ambiguous, making it difficult for participants to be aware. Based on these study results, discussions and implications for the experience of career interruption among highly educated women are included.