Career Counseling With Juvenile Offenders: Effects on Self-Efficacy and Career Maturity

An Analysis of Systems of Influences through the Lens of Balanced Time Perspective: A Qualitative Study on a Group of Inmates

To respond to the increasing challenges of the XXI century, career guidance is used as a device to reduce inequalities, to expand the range of opportunities for all people, to deconstruct the stereotypes and the stigmatizations that tend to relegate specific social categories to particular working niches, and to offer people the chance to express their differences and diversities. This study reports the results of research aimed at understanding the dynamics of career construction in people with imprisonment experience through the exploration of their systems of influences; the stories of the inmates were collected using My System of Career Influences (MSCI). In the analysis of the narratives and the systems of influences, the focus was placed on the balanced time perspective as a core dimension to foster career construction and to look at future possibilities. The results show that the participants are mainly focused on the past, and their focus on the present is narrow and seems to represent a moment of stalemate, preventing the possibility for inmates to imagine their future. Suggestions for practical implications of career counseling for inmates are provided, and the knowledge about the temporal orientation of prisoners will enable those who do not show any hope of achieving positive interactions to be reached and provide a higher degree of individualization for social rehabilitation proposals.

Personality Traits as Predictors of Malevolent Creative Ideation in Offenders

Malevolent creativity, which can be defined as creativity that is deliberately planned to damage others, is a concept that explains how the capacity to generate novel and effective outcomes (creativity) may, on occasion, be misapplied. The present study used 130 male inmates of the Oradea Maximum Security Penitentiary in Romania to explore the ability of a set of personality variables (the dark triad, self-efficacy, and self-esteem) to predict malevolent creative ideation. The findings indicate that Machiavellianism and self-efficacy were significant predictors of malevolent creative ideation in the form of lying, while only Machiavellianism was a significant predictor of malevolent creative ideation in the form of hurting people. In addition, the present study found significant differences among subgroups in the sample, with more experienced offenders showing higher levels of malevolent creative ideation.

An analysis of career maturity among Korean youths using latent growth modeling

This study examined the developmental trajectories of career maturity among Korean youths between late adolescence and mid-20s, and explored how career-counseling experiences, academic achievement, household income, parental involvement, and gender affected their career maturity. We used the 2,362 Youth Panel data collected between 2008–2014 by the Korea Employment Information Service. Career maturity increased linearly over time and decreased gradually after the fourth wave. Multivariate latent growth modeling revealed that a higher intercept of household income, academic achievement, and parental involvement were associated with a higher intercept of career maturity, whereas the effect of these variables on career maturity decreased over time. A higher intercept of career-counseling experiences was related to a higher intercept of career maturity. As the frequency of career-counseling experiences increased rapidly over time, so did career maturity. Career-counseling experiences and household income indirectly affected career maturity through the mediation of academic achievement. The female students’ level of career maturity was higher than that of the male students. However, this tendency decreased over time. This study’s results of the impact of career counseling on career maturity implies that schools should expand their career education and counseling programs.