Work and Career Counseling Pearson, Term Paper

The most pronounced counseling implication of this study is its support for applying and expanding the comprehensive career counseling model proposed by Bloland and Edwards (1981). Their model focused on helping people improve their quality of life by meeting their psychological needs through a combination of work and leisure activities. Because increases in scores on both the JDI and the LSM indicate increases in need satisfaction (Pearson, 1998), the results of the current study suggest that as participants reported more of their needs being met through their jobs and leisure, they experienced higher levels of psychological health.

RESULTS

Given that role overload was the strongest predictor of psychological health for all of the variables measured, it appears that women's perceptions toward and subjective experiences of their roles are more important than the number of roles in predicting overall psychological health and well-being. At the same time, results showed that the number of children was related to higher levels of role overload and lower levels of leisure satisfaction and psychological health, which provide some support for the role scarcity perspective, because perception of roles was dominant and the number of roles was a factor. On the other hand, the findings also provide support for the role enhancement hypothesis of Marks, because even though role overload was the strongest predictor of psychological health, job satisfaction and leisure satisfaction added to the prediction. Rather than providing clear support for one view of the impact of multiple roles to the exclusion of the other views, the findings support a more inclusive view such as the one expressed by Danes (1998), namely, "The enhancement and scarcity hypotheses are the anchors of a continuum" the enhancement and scarcity hypotheses are the anchors of a continuum such that various life roles can provide positive outlets until a threshold is crossed and the perceived demands exceed perceived available time and energy.In their career counseling model, Bloland and Edwards (1981) assumed people can enjoy a higher quality of life when work and leisure activities meet psychological needs. Thus, the major tasks of the counselor and client are to assess the client's needs, determine what combination of work and leisure activities might best meet those needs, and help the client engage in those chosen activities.

LIMITATIONS

The study's limitations included that the sample was limited to full-time employed women from a small region of the Southeast, and most were Caucasian.. They may have limited generalizability to people in other geographical areas, individuals of various racial and ethnic backgrounds, unemployed individuals, and men. Additionally, correlations could be inflated from similarity among the concepts being measured, similar items across instruments, and method variance. Method variance is potentially a problem in that the methods used for quantifying independent and dependent variables were the same, possibly inflating the reported relationships......