Practice and Research in Career Counseling and Development—2012

This annual review of the 2012 career development/vocational psychology literature includes 191 empirical (69%) and conceptual (31%) articles from career, counseling, development, and international journals. The review is divided into 4 major areas: professional issues, work and well-being, life-span perspectives, and career theory and concepts. Subsumed within these clusters are foci on the status of career/vocational guidance around the globe, the career development experiences of immigrants, and the effects of economic stress. The authors offer three summarizing impressions. First, the 2012 collection is definitively global; this is a credit to the individual and institutional dimensions of the counseling profession. Second, the research articles represent a wide array of methodological approaches, and researchers have made wise research design choices for their areas of inquiry. Third, there is a true professional responsiveness to the needs of the world. It is suggested that the 2012 literature reflects Parsons's early vision of social justice and multiculturalism.We open the 2012 annual review by expressing our gratitude for being invited to complete this task for The Career Development Quarterly (CDQ). Although we were still swimming in the information collected at the time of this writing, we recognize the honor of the task, and we hope that our product will be helpful to those who use it. We are also grateful for the scholars who preceded us in this endeavor. Their reviews (e.g., Erford & Crockett, 2012; Hartung, 2010) were most helpful to us in charting a course through the published works. Consequently, with few departures, our process and structure mirror our predecessors in this genre.We began the review by accessing and reviewing the full text versions of six career development journals: CDQ Journal of Vocational Behavior, Journal of Career Assessment (JCA), Journal of Career Development (JOCD), Journal of Employment Counseling (JEC), and the International Journalfor Educational & Vocational Guidance (IJEVG). We also searched for topically relevant published articles from the following counseling and psychology journals: Adultspan, American Psychologist, Counseling Psychologist, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of College Counseling, Journal of Counseling & Development (JCD), Journal of Counseling Psychology, Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development, Journal of Organizational Behavior (JOB), Measurement and Evaluation in Counseling and Development, Professional School Counseling Journal, and Rehabilitation Counseling Bulletin. Finally, we searched the PsycINFO database for articles we might have missed. Our review resulted in 191 published articles: 53% were quantitative, 10% qualitative, 4% mixed methods, 2% meta-analyses, and 31% were conceptual.In a manner consistent with our predecessors, we attempted to write the review in a manner that will be useful to practitioners; we followed the spaceefficient formatting tradition of dropping the year of publication (2012); and, although most articles could have been reviewed in more than one section, we reviewed each article in only one category. Our review is divided into the following four topical clusters: (a) professional issues, (b) work and well-being, (c) life-span perspectives, and (d) career theory and concepts. We depart from our predecessors in two notable ways. First, because the development of a scale/measure often informs a theory or practice, we do not have a special section devoted to career assessment/testing. Rather, we incorporate that information where it is topically relevant. For example, Dik, Eldridge, Steger, and Duffy's new measures on calling and vocation are described in the section on career constructs (i.e., calling). Second, we perceived that international scholarship is finally well represented across the scope of our coverage. Including international contributions (e.g., understanding the career transitions for individuals in post-Socialist Macedonia) with the rest of the domestic and international literature on career transitions (in the life-span category) served to highlight where research findings do and do not generalize across cultural boundaries. …