An overview on life-span, life-space theory Essay

Life-span, Life-space Theory.
Donald Super's life- span, life-space theory of career development offers a firm foundation for research in role salience. Super (1980) posited that people play a variety of roles as they mature through their life-span. He specified nine major life roles that he believed could be used to describe most people during the course of a lifetime. In approximate chronological order, these roles include child, student, leisurite (a person engaged in leisure-time activities), citizen, worker, spouse, homemaker, parent, and pensioner. Super argued that the sequence and duration of the roles may vary. "The constellation of interacting, varying, roles constitutes the career" (Super, 1980, p. 284). Furthermore, Super offered the notion that these life roles are typically performed in four principles theaters the home, the community, the school, and the workplace. The importance of these roles will fluctuate throughout a person's life-span. As an outcome of the Work importance Study (WIS), Super (1982), Presented three basic components of role importance commitment (conative component), participation (behavioral components), and knowledge (cognitive component).As a result, role salience is frequently operationalized in terms of these components.
Identity Theory
A second foundational theory for role salience research is identity theory. According to identity theory (Stryker, 1968), people are made up of a collection of identities that are based on particular life roles. Stryker, (1968) posited that individuals attach salience to their identities of roles so that the multiple role identities are organized into a hierarchical structure. The role expectations of those roles that are most salient or highest in the hierarchical structure will be most likely to dictate the behavioral choices that an individual makes in a given situation. Essentially, individuals will choose to spend more time in more salient role (Greenhaus & Beutell, 1985), possibility that interfering with their ability to meet the demands of the other role. Indeed, Powell and Greenhaus (2006) found that when a work activity and a family activity were scheduled at the same time, individuals who were high in family role salience were more likely to choose to participate in the family activity than the work activity.
Social Role Theory
A third theory used to frame research in role salience is social theory. This framework is helpful in understanding sex differences that are observed in role salience. Offered by Alice Eagly in (1987), social role theory emerged as an attempt to explain sex differences and similarities in social behavior (Eagly, Wood, & Diekman, 2000). According to social role theory, people's beliefs about the sexes develop from observations of how men and women perform their roles. As a result, individual ideas regarding differences and similarities in the sexes reflect the sexual division of labor and gender hierarchy of the greater society. Essentially, these beliefs from the gender roles that foster actual differences in the behaviors of the sexes. However, in social role theory, these gender roles are treated as dynamic facets of culture that are subject to transform in response to shifts in the typical work and family roles of the sexes.