Contributions of psychological separation and parental attachment to the career development process.

Abstract

The degree to which psychological separation and parental attachment are related to the careerdecision-making and commitment to career choices processes of college students was examined.In Study 1, the hypothesis was tested that young adults who report difficulties in psychologicalseparation would evidence career indecision and deficits in career decision-making self-efficacy;this hypothesis was not supported. In Study 2, the hypothesis was tested that perceptions ofpsychological separation and parental attachment would be positively related to progress in thecommitment process and inversely related to the tendency to foreclose. A canonical analysisyielded significant results that were generally consistent with theoretical expectations. For women,attachment to and conflictual independence from both parents were positively related to progressin the commitment process and negatively related to the tendency to foreclose. For men,attachment to, attitudinal dependence on, and conflictual independence from their fathers werepredictive of progress in the commitment process.Despite their apparent diversity, virtually all the majorcareer choice and developmental theories acknowledge tovarying extents the role of the family in the career develop-ment of late adolescents and young adults. However, even inmodels that highlight family influences (e.g., Hotchkiss B Roe, 1956), the exact nature of the family'scontribution to the career decision-making process remainsunclear. Whereas a variety of familial factors (e.g., familyconfiguration, socioeconomic status, parental occupation andemployment; Mortimer, 1976; Schulenberg, Vondracek, C Rice, Cole, & Lap-sley, 1990). The notion that late adolescents and young adultsneed to separate and individuate has also been discussed byfamily systems theorists (e.g., Bowen, 1978/1986). Althougha number of scholars (e.g., Nichols, 1987) have identifiedimportant conceptual similarities between family systems andcontemporary psychoanalytic theories (particularly object re-lations and self psychology theories), one common theme inrelation to the questions posed here is the importance ofadolescent-parent relationships in late adolescent develop-ment (e.g., Bios, 1979; Carter & McGoldrick, 1980; Josselson,1988). Following these theoretical suggestions, recent empir-ical research has indicated that late adolescents' perceptionsof separation and attachment are predictive of various indexesof adolescent development (e.g., Armsden & Greenbeig, 1987;Grotevant & Cooper, 1985; Hoffman, 1984; Lopez, Camp-bell, & Watkins, 1988).In the career domain of development, several early modelsof family influence on the nature of one's career choices (e.g.,Bordin, Nachmann, & Segal, 1963; Roe, 1956) have beenproposed. Despite the explanatory richness of these formula-tions, this line of work has yielded few conclusive findings.More recently , a number of vocational psychologists (e.g.Bratcher, 1982; Lopez & Andrews, 1987; Zingaro, 1983) haveadopted the systems view of the family as a means of under-standing career development. One of the major propositionsin this line of thought is that specific career behaviors mayserve a broader function within the scope of a given familysystem (e.g., Bratcher, 1982; Lopez & Andrews, 1987; Zin-garo, 1983). Perhaps the most compelling aspect of this posi-tion, as articulated by Lopez and Andrews (1987), relies onthe assumption that because the primary developmental tasksof late adolescence—psychological separation and the devel-opment, specification, and implementation of career