Content Analysis of CDQ from 1994-2003: Implications and Trends for Practitioners and Researchers from a Decade of Research

A review of the concent of The Career Development Quarterly (CDQ) was conducted for the period between 1994 and 2003. In total, 297 articles were published in CDQ during this period. The content analysis was based on content, authorship, and institutional affiliation. The principal areas of research were career development: life-span perspectives and women's workforce participation. Of the articles published during this period, 33% fell into 1 of these 2 categories. Compared with the previous analysis (W. Buboltz & M. Savickas, 1994), a change was noted in the amount of research in women's workforce participation, which rose from 1.4% to 12.8%, whereas research on career development interventions fell by approximately 50%. The authors discuss implications and areas for future research. Professional journals have a substantive history as a means of communication between researchers and practitioners. However, professional journals have also become a means for one discipline, based on a clear focal point of research, to differentiate itself from other closely related disciplines (Kuhn, 1962). Owing to both a proliferation of professionals oriented toward career development and to an extensive peer-review process, it can be assumed that the articles published in The Career Development Quarterly (CDQ) represent the extant body of knowledge as well as the current thinking of professionals in career development. Trends in journal content may also be said to reflect the current Zeitgeist of the field (Buboltz, Miller, & Williams, 1999). As such, a content analysis is a useful tool to quantify the trends and changes that are occurring in a profession. The last content analysis was conducted a decade ago by Buboltz and Savickas (1994). During the last decade, there has been unprecedented career flux as well as an increase in the entry of women into the workforce (Hansen, 2001). In fact, many of the women who first entered the workforce are near retirement. These changes in workforce characteristics are creating avenues of research that simply did not exist a decade ago. With research standards (and job requirements) for both academicians and practitioners increasing, there is also the possibility that there have been changes in content areas of research, as well as changes in the institutional affiliations, since the last content analysis (Buboltz & Savickas, 1994). Our content analysis also provides information for individuals in graduate school to identify leading researchers in the field of career counseling and leading institutions. Future researchers may also identify areas about which articles are consistently published by this journal to identify trends of research in the field. Given these goals and the potential changes that have occurred over the last decade, a content analysis is useful to catalog these trends and changes as well as to identify areas that have been neglected in the research literature. Method In order to provide consistency, the method of content analysis used here largely follows the procedure used for the last analysis (Buboltz & Savickas, 1994), which was conducted 10 years ago. The first step in this procedure was to classify each of the 297 articles according to each of the 14 categories used by Fitzgerald and Rounds (1989); those categories were first articulated by Fitzgerald and Rounds as the key focal points of vocational literature. The 14 categories, as defined by Fitzgerald and Rounds, are decision-making process, reciprocal work and nonwork relationships, work-related stress and coping, personnel practices and issues, workplace justice, industrial-organizational measurement issues, leadership, assessment: vocational behavior, career development interventions, women's workforce participation, adjustment and development in organizations, vocational choice: person-environment (P-E) fit perspectives, career development: life-span perspectives, and job search. …