Contextual Supports Research Articles

The Relationship Among Support, Ethnic Identity, Career Decision Self-Efficacy, and Outcome Expectations in African American High School Students

This study examines the influence of two potential sources of strength (i.e., ethnic identity and parent/teacher support) on the cognitive variables of career decision self-efficacy and outcome expectations in a sample of 104 African American ninth-grade students. The results indicate that parental support is positively related to career decision self-efficacy and teacher support is positively related to career decision self-efficacy and career outcome expectations. No relationship is found between ethnic identity and either self-efficacy or outcome expectations. The findings confirm the importance of considering contextual supports in career counseling and education. Limitations, implications for counseling, and suggestions for future research are discussed.

Constructively Challenging Diverse Inner-City Youth's Beliefs About Educational and Career Barriers and Supports

This study examines school and work barrier beliefs about the limitations of education for future career rewards and perceived supports for attaining the educational and career aspirations of low-income, inner-city, African American, Hispanic/Latino(a), and Caribbean immigrant youth. The authors find that higher levels of school andwork barrier beliefs are associated with lower aspirations, particularly for minority youth who are less recent immigrants. The authors described workshops designed to constructively challenge counterproductive school and work barrier beliefs by expanding participants' learning about accessible sources of support for attaining their school, work, and life goals. Results indicate that participants endorse two types of support sources: contextual supports (relational and community resources accessible in their environments) and personal resources (psychological assets within the individual). The authors propose that personal resources be conceptualized from social learning theory as facilitative task approach skills (e.g., productive work habits, learning-oriented performance expectations, helpful cognitive processes, beneficial problem orientations, self-regulated emotional responses, and other personal assets).

On Conceptualizing and Assessing Social Cognitive Constructs in Career Research: A Measurement Guide

Efforts to test hypotheses derived from social cognitive theory require sound measures of the theory’s constructs. Because the theory is concerned with domain-specific aspects of human functioning, it raises special measurement challenges. For example, unlike traits, which can be indexed with general, all-purpose measures, social cognitive research calls for measures that are tailored to the specific domain and dependent variables of interest. To facilitate social cognitive research on career development, a guide is provided for conceptualizing and assessing the core constructs of social cognitive career theory: self-efficacy, outcome expectations, interests, goals, and contextual supports and barriers. The basic constructs and their common variants are defined and distinguished, unique measurement concerns are considered, and examples and suggestions are offered for measurement design and adaptation.

The struggle for treatment integrity in a "dis-integrated" service delivery system.

QUALITY ... Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction and skilful execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives. Anonymous Abstract The purpose of this chapter is to describe an innovative family preservation program for delinquents, which exemplifies effective correctional treatment: Community Support Services of the St Lawrence Youth Association in Ontario Canada. Over 7 years, the program utilized the Teaching-Family Models (see Chapter 7 by Dean Fixsen, Karen Blase, Gary Timbers and Montrose Wolf in this book) integrated clinical, administrative, evaluation and supervision systems to ensure quality and treatment integrity. These systems will be delineated, along with some of the challenges of implementing an integrated treatment within a fragmented children's' services delivery system. The intention is to do so from a multilevel systems perspective (Bernfeld, Blase & Fixsen, 1990), in which four levels of analyses are used to examine the delivery of human services: client, program, agency and societal. Finally, suggestions are made for contextual supports for innovative programs, so as to foster their effectiveness, longevity and key role as catalysts for systemic change in children's services. Keywords: family preservation, delinquents, corrective treatment, Teaching Family Models, integrated treatment, contextual supports, children's services. EMPIRICAL FOUNDATIONS Community Support Services of the St Lawrence Youth Association was specifically developed in 1988 to offer intensive, short-term and flexible support to 12-15-year-old young offenders (juvenile delinquents) who are at of being placed in more restrictive residential settings, such as closed or secure custody. The aim was to start with the treatment orientation and procedures used by Alberta Family Support Services (Olivier, Oostenbrink, Benoit, Blase & Fixsen, 1992) with mostly child welfare clientele, and adapt them for use with young offenders. Thus, the two programs shared the same broad goal of integrating the well-researched treatment methods of the Teaching-Family Model (see Chapter 7) with the service delivery strategies of the Homebuilders Model (Whittaker, Kinney, Tracy & Booth, 1990), an exemplary family preservation program. Other literature supporting the development of the Community Support Services model include: * Clinically appropriate treatment, as defined in meta-analytic literature reviews (e.g. Gendreau, 1996; Chapter 2 by James McGuire and Chapter 4 by Friedrich Losel, both in this book), includes behavioral systems family therapy, intensive structured skill training and structured one-on-one paraprofessional programs. * Andrews, Leschied and Hoge's (1992) review identified a number of key risk factors for delinquency, which establish appropriate targets for treatment, including: cognitions (antisocial attitudes and values), family factors (low levels of affection/cohesiveness and supervision/monitoring, poor discipline, and neglect and abuse) and peer influences (association with antisocial companions and isolation from non-criminal peers). * Patterson, Reid and Dishion (1993) provided detailed empirical support for their developmental model of antisocial or coercive behavior, in which parents are key to the early training for antisocial behavior. As well, their research targeted the teaching of appropriate family management skills as essential to rehabilitating delinquents. * Christensen and Jacobson (1994) reviewed research on psychological treatment delivered by paraprofessionals and concluded that paraprofessionals are usually as effective as professionals. Given that the need for mental health services exceeds the supply of professionals and the costs savings afforded by paraprofessionals, they concluded that services delivered by non-professional therapists merit wider use and further research. …

Self-Efficacy and Vocational Outcome Expectations for Adolescents of Lower Socioeconomic Status: A Pilot Study

Relationships between contextual support, perceived educational barriers, and vocational/educational self-efficacy and outcome expectations were examined for a group of 114 ninth graders from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Results of this exploratory pilot study indicated that sibling and peer support accounted for a significant amount of variance in vocational/educational self-efficacy beliefs. Vocational/educational self-efficacy beliefs also significantly predicted vocational outcome expectations, and contextual supports and barriers did not account for any unique variance associated with vocational outcome expectations. Results are discussed in relation to social cognitive career theory. Implications for counseling and future research are presented.

Ethnic Differences in Career Supports and Barriers for Battered Women: a Pilot Study

Little empirical attention has been given to the career development needs of battered women. Using social cognitive career theory, the authors examined the relationships among abuse experiences, perceived career barriers, and contextual supports to the career-related self-efficacy and outcome expectations of 74 European American and ethnic minority battered women. The authors hypothesized that women of color would anticipate greater difficulty overcoming barriers, anticipate needing more future support, and have lower career-related self-efficacy and outcome expectations than European American women. Results showed no statistically significant ethnic group differences in participants’ perceptions of difficulty overcoming barriers, anticipated future support needed, and career-related self-efficacy and outcome expectations. Results did show ethnic group differences in the relationships between contextual supports and career-related self-efficacy and outcome expectations. The authors discuss implications for research and practice.

Relation of contextual supports and barriers to choice behavior in engineering majors: Test of alternative social cognitive models.

Social cognitive career theory (SCCT; R. w. Lent, S. D. Brown, & G. Hackett, 1994) and general social cognitive theory (Bandura, 1999, 2000) posit somewhat different relations between contextual variables and choice actions. The authors tested the predictions of these 2 model variations. Participants (328 students in an introductory engineering course) completed measures of SCCT's person (self-efficacy, coping efficacy, outcome expectations, interests, academic goals) and contextual variables (environmental supports and barriers) related to the pursuit of engineering majors. Findings indicated good support for a model portraying contextual supports and barriers as linked to choice goals and actions (i.e., persistence in engineering) indirectly, through self-efficacy, rather than directly, as posited by SCCT. Implications for future research on SCCT's choice and environmental hypotheses are discussed.

The role of contextual supports and barriers in the choice of math/science educational options: A test of social cognitive hypotheses.

Social cognitive career theory proposes that contextual supports and barriers play key roles in the career choice process, yet little research has examined hypotheses involving these variables. Participants (111 1 college students) completed measures of math/science-related course self-efficacy, coping efficacy, outcome expectations, interests, goals, and perceived contextual supports and barriers. Findings indicate that self-efficacy and outcome expectations were jointly predictive of interests and choice intentions. Support and barrier percepts produced only weak direct relations to choice, though barrier percepts were found to moderate interest-choice relations. A model portraying barriers and supports as linked to choice indirectly (via their impact on self-efficacy) produced better fit to the data than did a model specifying barriers and supports as directly linked to choice. Implications for future research and counseling are discussed.

The role of contextual supports and barriers in the choice of math/science educational options: A test of social cognitive hypotheses.

The role of contextual supports and barriers in the choice of math/science educational options: A test of social cognitive hypotheses.

Contextual supports and barriers to career choice: A social cognitive analysis.

Contextual supports and barriers to career choice: A social cognitive analysis.

Contextual supports and barriers to career choice: A social cognitive analysis.

Summary The foregoing review of the career barriers literaturepresents a mixed picture. On the one hand, students andworkers do perceive barriers to their career progress; but onthe other hand, barrier ratings are often found to besomewhat modest in size and have not been shown to beconsistently related to important career outcome or processvariables in the mostly student samples in which they havebeen studied. This is not to say that barriers are notconsequential for many Individuals. Indeed, they are likelyto be especially salient for those who have been victimizedby various forms of oppression. However, several concep-tual and methodological issues—such as the manner inwhich barriers have been defined, failure to consider thecontext and temporal specificity of barriers, noncorrespon-dence between barriers and outcome criteria (in terms ofcontent and developmental task), infrequent attention tomediating and moderating variables, understudy of nonstu-dent samples, and use of designs that do not explorepotential causal effects of barriers—may have partly ob-scured the impact of perceived barriers and the mechanismsthrough which they affect career behavior.Despite these considerations, recent career barriers re-search has constructed an important conceptual and method-ological foundation for further inquiry, and the program-matic research of Swanson, McWhirter, and Luzzo and theircolleagues has been particularly pivotal. In the remainder ofthis article, we attempt to build on this foundation, offering amodest set of suggestions for future research on careerbarriers and their conceptual partner, career supports. Thesesuggestions are premised on the need to clarify or elaboratecertain aspects of SCCT having relevance for the conceptu-alization and assessment of contextual variables.

Psychological Needs and the Facilitation of Integrative Processes

The assumption that there are innate integrative or actualizing tendencies underlying personality and social development is reexamined. Rather than viewing such processes as either nonexistent or as automatic, I argue that they are dynamic and dependent upon social-contextual supports pertaining to basic human psychological needs. To develop this viewpoint, I conceptually link the notion of integrative tendencies to specific developmental processes, namely intrinsic motivation; internalization; and emotional integration. These processes are then shown to be facilitated by conditions that fulfill psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness, and forestalled within contexts that frustrate these needs. Interactions between psychological needs and contextual supports account, in part, for the domain and situational specificity of motivation, experience, and relative integration. The meaning of psychological needs (vs. wants) is directly considered, as are the relations between concepts of integration and autonomy and those of independence, individualism, efficacy, and cognitive models of "multiple selves."

Guidelines for social services grants

Guidelines for spending federal grants to the states for social services changed repeatedly between 1962 and 1975. The process of preparing guidelines changed, and so did their content. These changes are described and explained. Guidelines at all stages failed to provide intelligible and useful instructions to federal and state administrators. In part this was because the contextual supports that normally help to give effect to grant-in-aid guidelines—explicit antecedents in the law, and implicit understandings among administrators at different levels of the federal system—were lacking or seriously defective. Beyond that, in each of their different phases the guidelines proved untenable because of dysfunctions that may have been peculiar to the respective processes by which they were prepared.