Role Salience and Multiple Roles: A Gender Perspective.

From the beginning, Donald Super has recognized that people make a life while they are making a living. For Super, career decisions are only one aspect of life as a journey, made richer through self-understanding and choices based on personal goals and meanings. Each destination reached becomes part of the pattern of an individual life and part of the emergent future as well.This vision of a life career is both noble and vague--inevitably so because its exact contours are shaped by the particulars of an individual's life events. The challenge to Super as a theorist, researcher, and counselor has been to develop concepts and tools that allow counselors to explore such slippery particulars with diverse clients and in a range of counseling settings.The most recent target of Super's work has been the multiple roles characterizing a person's life career. When asked to respond to the question, "Who am I? " individuals typically include descriptors portraying in shorthand responsibilities and relationships vis-a-vis others, for example, worker, partner or spouse, and parent. Super's work on the construct of role salience has defined some common roles, developed a measure appropriate for use in counseling practice and research, and recommended some applications within a developmental approach to career counseling. In this article, I will describe his work on role salience, and some recent theory and research on gender issues in multiple roles that support the wisdom of his basic ideas.WHAT IS ROLE SALIENCE? In general, developmental career counseling has sought to understand the meaning of work within a person's life history from a number of different perspectives (Jepsen, 1990). An individual's behavior is seen as purposeful, oriented toward making sense of the world and reaching personally meaningful life goals. Although every individual represents a range of interests, abilities, priorities, and so on, each individual functions as a unique, unified combination of characteristics. To understand what gives an individual's life structure and meaning, it is necessary to consider his or her involvement in a variety of life roles including but surpassing the paid work role. In Jepsen's (1990) evocative imagery, "work career is embedded within life history as one strand is entwined in a rope" (p. 121). In Super's theory, strands of this rope consist of nine major roles commonly played by a person throughout or at specific points in his or her life span: son or daughter, student, leisurite, citizen, worker, spouse, homemaker, parent, and annuitant or pensioner. The Life Career Rainbow visually depicts how these roles constitute a life career from birth until death according to the amount of time spent and the person's emotional involvement in each role (see discussions in Nevill & Super, 1986; Super, 1990; Super, Osborne, Walsh, Brown, & Niles, 1992). The importance of a role can be determined by three criteria: (a) commitment, referring to one's emotional attachment to a role; (b) participation, or actually spending time and energy in a role; and (c) knowledge, gained through direct or vicarious experience in a role (Nevill & Super, 1986). The term role salience can refer to varying combinations of the qualities of role commitment, participation, and knowledge. Role salience, in particular worker role salience, is important to assess in developmental career counseling, along with a person's career maturity or adaptability, values sought in work, and other determinants of satisfying career decisions (Super, 1990). Super has implied that a certain (unspecified) minimal level of work role salience is essential in career decision making. Clients with low work role salience may need to increase their awareness of or interest in work prior to making career decisions, or perhaps choose to focus on other life roles instead. Second, clients engaged in developmental career counseling should explore how work fits into other life roles and how their own values are involved in life roles in general. …