Language offers a vast amount of information about an individual's social and personality processes. Prior studies have found links between personality traits, attitudes, and language use. To further extend prior work on links between personality traits, attitudes, and language use, this study examined the link between career goal affordance…

Different cross-domain trajectories in the development of students' ability self-concepts (ASCs) and their intrinsic valuing of math and language arts were examined in a cross-sequential study spanning Grades 1 through 12 (n = 1,069). Growth mixture modeling analyses identified a "Moderate Math Decline/Stable High Language Arts" class…

Four topics were investigated in this longitudinal person-centered study: (a) profiles of subjective task values and ability self-concepts of adolescents in the domain of mathematics, (b) the stability of and changes to the profiles of motivational beliefs from Grade 7 to 12, (c) the relation of changes to student-perceived classroom…

Which occupation to pursue is one of the more consequential decisions people make and represents a key developmental task. Yet the underlying developmental processes associated with either individual or group differences in occupational choices are still not well understood. This study contributes toward filling this gap, focusing in particular on…

In this international, longitudinal study, we explored gender differences in, and gendered relationships among, math-related motivations emphasized in the Eccles (Parsons) et al. (1983) expectancy-value framework, high school math participation, educational aspirations, and career plans. Participants were from Australia, Canada, and the United…

Exploration and identity formation are primary developmental tasks during adolescence and the transition to adulthood. Yet little is known about occupational identity formation and growth during this period of life. In this chapter, the authors describe their ongoing research on this topic. First, they present their findings on the ontogeny of the…

Two independent studies were conducted to extend previous research by examining the associations between task value priority patterns across school subjects and aspirations toward the physical and information technology- (IT-) related sciences. Study 1 measured task values of a sample of 10th graders in the United States (N = 249) across (a)…

We examined 2 hypotheses regarding why some young women do not maintain their espoused occupational aspirations in male-dominated fields from late adolescence through young adulthood. The first hypothesis concerns attitudes towards math and science; the second concerns the desire for job flexibility. The sample of young women (N=104) was taken…

Examined relations among parenting dimensions and adolescents' occupational aspirations related to academics and sports. Found that parents' values predicted youths' values directly in the academic domain. Fathers' behaviors mediated the relation between parents' and youths' sports values. Identification was directly related to adolescents'…