Understanding and Facilitating Career Development of People of Appalachian Culture: An Integrated Approach

The literature on career development for people of Appalachian culture is sparse. This article reviews cultural values of Appalachians and proposes an innovative career intervention model to best serve people of this culture. The model integrates the concepts of the social cognitive career development approach (R. W. Lent, S. D. Brown, & G. Hackett, 1994) and ecological counseling principles (R. K. Conyne & E. P. Cook, 2004). As this model demonstrates, providing contextual and cultural accommodation is critical in order to gain the trust and permission to work with people of Appalachian culture. Research on career development of minority groups has been increasingly popular in the past 2 decades, but literature on people of Appalachian culture is more limited. Most of the literature focuses on the four major minority groups as identified in the multicultural textbooks: Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, African Americans, and Native Americans. People of Appalachian culture have become an invisible minority because they do not appear outwardly different from mainstream Americans. This is particularly true of the "urban Appalachian" minority because they are encountered unexpectedly outside the area labeled Appalachia. Often considered as simply part of a lower socioeconomic group rather than as a cultural minority, people of Appalachian culture have their own distinct cultural values that differ from those of mainstream Americans. Appalachians Are defined as people born in the geographic area along the spine of the Appalachian Mountains, which include the Great Smoky Mountains and the Cumberland Mountains. The legal geographical boundaries were set by the Appalachian Regional Development Act of 1965 (ARDA; 1965) and include 406 counties in 13 states (all of West Virginia and parts of Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia). ARDA created the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC), which divided Appalachia into three subrogions: Northern (all Appalachian counties in Maryland, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania and some in Virginia and West Virginia), Central (all Appalachian counties in eastern Kentucky and some in Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia), and Southern (remaining Appalachian counties of Tennessee and Virginia, plus those in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, and South Carolina). Two thirds of the region is composed of rural counties (populations less than 10,000), with one third of the Appalachian population living in them, which is more than double the percentage of the rural population in all of the United States. Central Appalachia has the highest concentration of rural counties and the fewest urban ones. African Americans represent about 8% of the total population for people of Appalachian culture but a higher percentage (about 17%) of urban Appalachians (Maloney & Auffrey, 2004). Urban Appalachians, as referred to in this article and as titled by themselves (e.g., Urban Appalachian Council), are people of Appalachia who have migrated from the ARC region to cities outside Appalachia, not those living in cities within the ARC boundaries (Couto, 2002; Lewis, 2002; Obermiller & Howe, 2002). Estimates vary that from 2 to 5 million Black and White people of Appalachian culture migrated into midvvestern urban areas between 1940 and 1970, resulting in large subcultures in such cities as Detroit, Chicago, and Cincinnati (Berry, 2000; Borman & Obermiller, 1994; Hobbs, 1998; Iones, 2002; Wilson, 1983). The basic difference between people who remained in Appalachia and those who migrated to urban areas outside Appalachia was primarily home and/or land ownership, thus having an entrenched economic stake in thecommunity. Company ownership of workers' homes was one contributing factor to mobility. Share-cropping was another. There was no great demand for housing in most Appalachian areas during the 1940s to the 1970s, which made it difficult to convert what was often a family's soleasset to cash for moving expenses. …