Reactions to My Career Chapter 1 An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis of Adult Clients ’ Experience of My Career

This paper reports a study of adult clients’ experience of My Career Chapter; which is a theoretically-informed, qualitative career assessment and counselling procedure. My Career Chapter engenders personal exploration through a client’s writing and reading aloud a careerrelated autobiography, which is formulated on the basis of structured steps and a sentencecompletion process. In a predominantly qualitative, mixed method design (i.e., QUAL+quan), interpretative phenomenological analysis of six interview transcripts constructed three major clusters representative of clients’ experiences: Implications for instructions and guidelines; induction of personal contemplation and self-reflection; and positive emotional experience. Secondary quantitative data aligned with the primary qualitative results. The results of this study were consistent with and extend upon previous research; and were indicative of the safety and potential of My Career Chapter as a narrative career assessment and counselling procedure for adults. Reactions to My Career Chapter 3 An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis of Adult Clients’ Experience of My Career Chapter With notable flagship publications leading and guiding the field (e.g., Cochran, 1997; Peavy, 1997), narrative career counselling is an accepted approach to practice, with a variety of emergent applied theoretical frameworks, and assessment and intervention techniques and instruments (McIlveen & Patton, 2007a). Yet, despite the proliferation of narrative assessment procedures—under the aegis of constructivism—there has been insufficient research into their outcomes and processes (McIlveen & Patton, 2007a); which is a state of affairs consistent with equivalently limited research into career counselling outcome and process broadly (Whiston & Oliver, 2005). This paper contributes to the applied research literature on process (cf. Heppner & Heppner, 2003) by reporting on an investigation into adult clients’ experience of a new narrative assessment and counselling procedure: My Career Chapter: A Dialogical Autobiography (McIlveen, 2006)—shortened to My Career Chapter for convenience. Description of My Career Chapter My Career Chapter is a theoretically-informed procedure based upon the Systems Theory Framework (Patton & McMahon, 2006), the Theory of Career Construction (Savickas, 2005), and the Theory of Dialogical Self (Hermans & Kempen, 1993); and, moreover, it is informed by scholarship toward those theories’ integration (McIlveen, 2007c; McIlveen & Patton, 2007b). My Career Chapter facilitates clients’ writing of a careerrelated autobiography ranging across their views on myriad factors and influences upon their careers, using a guided and structured format, presented in a printed workbook. It is prescribed by counsellors as a homework task, should an interpretative narrative approach be chosen as an appropriate intervention. With respect to the writing of the manuscript, the client works through seven Steps laid out in a printed booklet, beginning in Step 1 with general career-related questions as “warm-up exercises” to orient the user to the autobiographical project. In Step 2, the client contemplates the proximal influences (e.g., personal: gender, interests, values; interpersonal: relationships, family) and distal influences (e.g., social: community groups; environmental/societal: labour market) described in the Systems Theory Framework. This contemplation process is facilitated in Step 3: It requires the client to rate how compatible or incompatible the influences in his or her life are with one another, in a matrix with proximal and distal influences opposing one another. The 5-point rating scale includes -2 = very much incompatible, -1 = mostly incompatible, 0 = neither compatible nor incompatible, +1 = mostly compatible, to +2 = very much incompatible. The compatibility matrix task operationalised the notion that a person, as a dialogical self (Hermans & Kempen, 1993), can take multiple internal and external positions on himself or herself. Methodologically, it was fashioned upon the principles of an established psychometric derived from the Theory of Dialogical Self: The Personal Position Repertoire (Hermans, 2001). Having completed the compatibility task which aims to “decentre” the client’s thinking of himself or herself, the client then writes the bulk of the autobiographical manuscript in Step 4: A structured process consisting of a series of part-sentences associated with each of the influences of the Systems Theory Framework. This was modelled after the sentence-completion procedure for exploring ego development (Loevinger, 1985). Each influence is expressed in a past, present, and future sentence-stem, along with two sentence-stems containing ratings of how strong the influence is for the client in terms of its impact, and how the client feels in relation to it. For example, the career influence age would entail the following: When I was younger. My age allows me to. Reactions to My Career Chapter 4 By the time I reach retirement I want. I mostly feel very positive / positive / indifferent / negative / very negative in relation to my age because. My age has a very positive / positive / neutral / negative / very negative impact upon by career life because. Upon completing the sentence-completion task (which is the bulk of the autobiography), in Step 5 the client must submit the draft to an “editor” for proof reading and review. The editor, in this case, is the client himself or herself, but 5 years younger. The client reads the manuscript aloud to himself or herself, as if he or she were the younger self, and then in reply writes editorial comments to the older (current) self. Upon receiving the editorial comments, the older (current) self writes back to the editor with a summary of the career story and future. This self-editorial process was founded upon a similar procedure used to generate dialogical transactions with oneself (cf. Hermans & Kempen, 1993). In Step 6 the manuscript is completed by the writing of a conclusion section with a focus upon strengths, obstacles, and the future. Step 7 is an open space for writing reflective ideas and experiences that may arise over days subsequent to completion of the manuscript. The writing phase can take up to 2 hours; it may be completed in one sitting or over several periods according to the client’s preferences. The completed manuscript is subsequently read aloud by the counsellor in the next session. Whilst engaged in the reading process, the counsellor may elect to form his/her own interpretations of the text, and present them to the client unilaterally or co-constructively. Following the reading and interpretation process, the manuscript and subsequent dialogue are integrated into counselling thereafter. The dual reading of the manuscript—the client with himself or herself, and subsequently with a counsellor—is a crucial feature of My Career Chapter, serving to further embed its theoretical dialogical processes. Hence, My Career Chapter not only engenders personal exploration through writing and hearing a story, its resultant text serves as idiographic assessment data. Accordingly, its design aligns with evidence pertaining to the value of written exercises and individualized interpretation described by Brown and Ryan Krane (2000). My Career Chapter is similar to the My System of Career Influences reflection activity (McMahon, Patton, & Watson, 2005, 2007), which is likewise based upon the Systems Theory Framework. Both facilitate users’ exploring their career influences and documenting their understanding in a workbook. A difference between the two is that My Career Chapter is predominantly verbal in process, whereas My System of Career Influences is more inclusive of visual and spatial processing through clients drawing their systems of career influences. Whilst they are not parallel forms in a psychometric sense, they present a useful alternative for practitioners wishing to operationalise the Systems Theory Framework and a choice between a verbal and visual procedure, depending upon the counsellors’’ and/or clients’ needs and preferences. Research Status The theoretical origins of My Career Chapter have been explored critically and reflexively in an autoethnographic study (McIlveen, 2007b). Research has investigated counsellors’’ experience of My Career Chapter in a formal training program, which was inclusive of their personal application of the procedure and their subsequent professional appraisal of its construction and potential clinical utility for adults (McIlveen, 2007a) and adolescents (McIlveen, Patton, & Hoare, 2007). Both of those studies found that My Career Chapter closely aligned with the recommendations for the construction and administration of qualitative career assessment procedures proposed by McMahon and colleagues (2003). It was recommended, nevertheless, that My Career Chapter’s instructions be modified or simplified, particularly for the compatibility task of Step 3. A study of adult clients’ Reactions to My Career Chapter 5 reactions to a pilot version of the procedure indicated that it was clinically safe with respect to not distressing or harming clients, and that there was evidence of a mild positive reaction to the process of its completion, including feelings of optimism and self-agency (McIlveen, Ford, & Dun, 2005). The current study extends the previous research into adult clients’ reactions by intensively investigating the experiences of individuals who used the procedure in relation to their seeking constructivist-oriented career counselling. Unlike the quantitative study by McIlveen, Ford and Dun, this study investigated clients’ experiences using a qualitative lens.