A psychosocial career counselling project with adolescents, parents, and people with a vulnerability: how the career development is impacted by personal resources and social context.

Currently, the society is considered risky, characterized by rapid changes, and noticeable by a not-linearity between the educational path and the consequent employment. Now, adolescents, young adults with a vulnerability, and parents have to learn to deal with an unpredictable, unstable, and complex future. Therefore, nowadays in Italy, the university is no longer the place where the parents sent their children (with or without a disability) ready to abdicate from their control, but parents tend to replace their children in career choices, pushing them toward only a supposed safer path (helicopter parents). In fact, all the economic and social changes have had a negative impact on the people’s career, in particular on the young adults with a vulnerability. In this context, career counselling services and researches should act, in order to sustain individual’s career development. In line with the career construction theory and the life design approach, in this thesis, the career and vocational guidance will be considered taking into account the family and the context, that are known to have a fundamental role. The life design approach, in fact, focuses on personal resources (e.g. career adaptability, hope, future orientations, and courage) considering the career development as a social and holistic process. In order to gain a better insight on the role of the context on career choices, it has been decided to engage in a more depth studies of the role played by parents. In fact, parent, as part of the scientific literature has underlined, are relevant for the representation of the future, self-representation and their children’s career choices. At the same time, the project gathered interesting data on the main psychosocial challenges, fears and stressors, which parents, adolescents, and young adults with a vulnerability face in their professional and educational world. Looking for a methodology that could bring an efficient answer to new guidance needs and to the complexity of the context influences, it was used mix methods, in order to find a stimulating way to examine the relationships between psychosocial career counselling, personal resources, and environment influences. Several studies were conducted in order to intercept the complexity of the social influence process. In particular, in the first part of the thesis, a picture of the social and economic changes that characterized the context in which the project took shape will be provided. The second chapter will explain the International Hope Research Team and its protocol applied to high school students, parents and people with a disability, in order to better understand the role of personal resources in youth’s career development. In addition, the presence of parents in university - a new social phenomenon - will be examined, with qualitative and quantitative data. In particular, the influence that parents have on the students’ representations and their children career choices will be discussed. The third chapter will introduce a new construct in career guidance and counselling: courage. A qualitative research will be presented, in order to investigate the courage youth representations and the role that courage have to face crisis and gender discriminations in career. This chapter will explain national and international researches, in order to analyse the role of courage in the career construction behaviour. The methodological approach, the process of data collection, and several processes of analysis, will be described in each chapter, underling the role that the social context assume in the career development. In conclusion, the main results about the social and parental influence and the implication for the practice and for the future research will be discussed.