A Theory-Building Investigation of the School-to-Work Transition

This study sought to enhance an understanding of the school-to-work transition for work-bound high school students. The objective was to identify individual and contextual factors relevant to the school-to-work transition. The authors obtained interview data from a diverse sample of 45 employed young men and women (aged 18-29) who have been in this transition during the past 10 years. Using a grounded theory approach, a coding system was developed with quantitative and qualitative indexes. The authors used job satisfaction and occupational choice congruence as subjective and objective means of capturing an adaptive school-to-work transition. Initial correlational analyses were conducted with quantitatively derived variables to provide a framework for qualitative analyses. Qualitative analyses of participant narratives revealed several individual and contextual factors that characterize the adaptive school-to-work transition. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of these findings for career development theory as well as some propositions to guide future inquiry in this area.