The Joint Action of Parents and Adolescents in Conversation about Career

Analyses of 14 videotaped parent-adolescent career conversations reveal the socially constructed nature of career. These analyses are used to identify joint actions in career conversations, determine their patterns, and address their meaning for the participants. Joint action refers to the action that people take together or that occurs between them. The participants used 3 superordinate joint actions (struggle, exploration, and negotiation) and several subordinate joint actions. Three patterns of joint actions were also identified. The joint actions had particular meaning for both career and the relationship between the participants This study addresses the joint actions parents and adolescents undertake in their career-related conversations. Strong, Yoder, and Corcoran ( 1995) recently suggested that more counseling research should focus on joint action, a concept they saw as fundamental to human agency and its enhancement. Joint action is defined in general terms as the intentional behavior of a group of people attempting to realize a common goal or engage in a common process. Preparing a meal together or improvising with a jazz quartet are examples of joint actions, but, as Shotter (1993) pointed out, dialogue with others is the most obvious situation in which joint action occurs. The conversations parents and adolescents have together about career are joint actions because they are not specifled entirely by the individual intentions or actions of either person but are determined by what happens between them. Previous research on family and career has found family variables to be predictive of career and career-related outcomes in adolescents and young adults (Blustein, Walbridge, Friedlander, & Palladino,1991; Kinnier, Brigman, & Noble,1990; Lopez,1989; Penick & Jepsen,1992; Schultheiss & Blustein,1994). However, these studies relied on self-report data rather than examining what actually occurs between parents and adolescents. Similarly, studies of activities undertaken by parents in career development programs have been related to increases in adolescents' sense of agency regarding career (Kush & Cochran, 1993), and parental bonding and career maturity (Palmer & Cochran, 1988). Activities have also been reported from the perspective of either the parent or the adolescent (Young & Friesen,1992;Young, Friesen, & Pearson, 1988). None of these studies has examined in detail the joint activities of parents and adolescents as they develop in career-related conversations. Joint action is particularly pertinent to the study of parental influence in the career development of young people. Adolescents seek out their parents as a primary resource for discussion about career (Sebald, 1986; Wilks, 1985) and parents themselves want to help their adolescents in this domain (Young & Friesen, 1992). However, Maccoby (1992) suggested that parental influence not be thought of simply as unidirectional or even bidirectional but stemming "from the nature of the relationship that parents have constructed and continually reconstruct with their children" (p. 1014). None of the previous studies has addressed the joint goals, the shared meaning, or the regulation of action present in the career conversations between parents and adolescents. In this study, we attend to how career is constructed in parentadolescent conversations, specifically through joint goals. It represents a social constructionist perspective in which career and the meaning attached to it are constructed through social, historical, and cultural relationships and actions. In particular, this study is based on an action-theoretical approach (von Cranach,1982), which has recently been proposed for the study of career (Valach, 1990; Young & Valach,1996; Young, Valach, & Collin, 1996; Young, Valach, Dillabough, Dover, & Matthes, 1994). In the action-theoretical approach, the concept of intentional and goal-directed action is used instead of the concept of behavior. …