Did you know that the authors of Make Your Job a Calling also have a great guest blog gig over at Psychology Today? It’s called Vocation Vocation Vocation and it offers a great mix of wisdom regarding calling and fun pop culture references. We occasionally cross-post some of the content over here, but you should really head over to the Psychology Today site and bookmark it to make sure you don’t miss anything.
Check out Bryan J. Dik’s wonderful address at the University of Dubuque. It was part of a recent program called the Wendt Character Initiative. With a title like “Web-Slinging and World-Changing: Career Guidance from Spider-Man, Martin Luther, and a Hospital Janitor,” how can you resist?
This post first appeared on Acculturated.com
by Ryan Duffy
Imagine you work at a job where your boss only cares about himself and openly dumps all of his work onto you. Your primary job tasks involve responding to citizen complaints and organizing community projects that more often than not go unnoticed. Oh yeah, and your coworkers consist of a well-meaning idiot, a selfish brat, a status-driven wannabe entrepreneur, a clumsy kiss-up, and an exercise fanatical perfectionist, among others. When you finally get a promotion to your dream job, one fellow coworker bribes you to get your new office and another makes you eat a bite of their Caesar salad and then tries to kiss you. Yet at the end of each day you (almost) always feel thrilled about your job.
For the approximately 3.5 million of us who have hung in there with Parks and Recreation over the last five seasons, the person described above is immediately recognizable: the positive, loveable, hardworking, selfless Leslie Knope, played expertly by Saturday Night Live alum Amy Poehler. For the first four seasons of the series, Leslie was the deputy director of the parks department in a small, fictitious town in Indiana called Pawnee, and at the end of the fourth season gets elected to city council. In the face of bad bosses, weird coworkers, and demanding and unappreciative citizens, Leslie somehow manages to truly love what she does. This is because, in “psychological speak,” Leslie approaches her work as a calling.
Psychologists have recently taken a keen interest in studying what it means to have and live out a calling. A calling is different from a job or career–it is something that a person feels pulled to do, is a central part of their life meaning or purpose, and is specifically used to help others. As deputy director of the parks department or as a city councilwoman, Leslie is defined by her job. As someone who constantly works to make Pawnee healthier or gives birthday celebrations even for her crotchety boss, Leslie is always helping others by her work or in her workplace. Research has shown that people like Leslie who live out their calling are more committed to, and happier with, their jobs and are also happier in life. In jobs that are particularly challenging like Leslie’s, having a calling may function as a protective mechanism–helping people stay motivated and engaged because they know this is they job they are supposed to be doing.
People who work in a mostly thankless job and/or in a workplace that is a few steps away from healthy might be able to learn a thing or two from Leslie. If we too want to reap those benefits of living out a calling, it may be less about choosing a perfect job and more about making the most of the job we do have. Maybe we can follow Leslie’s lead and ponder from time to time the ways we can make our work more meaningful and impactful–doing so may ultimately help us feel some of that Knope gusto.
Ryan Duffy is assistant professor of psychology at the University of Florida and coauthor of the book Make Your Job a Calling (Templeton Press, October 2012). He and his coauthor Bryan Dik have just started a blog at Psychology Today titled Vocation, Vocation, Vocation.
Check out the new podcast that Ryan and Bryan did for their issues of the Journal for Career Assessment!
That is the lead-off question in a recent op-ed that appeared in the New York Times. With “jobs” being one of the more salient buzzwords of the 2012 election season, it’s a question worth considering. If you have the time, head on over and see what philosopher Gary Gutting has to say about it all.
Check out this great feature that ESPN did on one of the best mixed martial arts gyms in the world: the Jackson/Winkeljohn Gym in Albuquerque, NM (which is, according to the article, “less a battlefield than an ashram”). The article and the accompanying video don’t address calling by name, but the themes certainly are present. To understand purpose as it relates to . . . well . . . punching someone in the face, you really only need to see what his fighters (some of the best in the world) say about trainer Greg Jackson:
I owe everything to you. – Nate Marquardt
You Are Creating a Whole New Me. – Cub Swanson
I am honored to be part of your team – Georges St-Pierre
The whole article is worth a few minutes of your day, even if you aren’t a fight fan. Check it out. Isn’t it great when calling-esque stories show up in unexpected places?
We just guest edited a special edition of the Journal of Career Assessment. The focus of this issue: calling, of course! You can check out the issue here. Lots of great research in this one.
In the old days, you had to meet with a counselor to take career assessments. The instruments came with a booklet, a score sheet, and a number 2 pencil. After taking the assessments, the counselor had to mail it off for scoring before you could see your scores and experience and interpretation of the results.
These paper-and-pencil instruments are still around, but career assessments are now ubiquitous on the web. Many of them are packaged with other assessments in career assessment systems, for which you are usually required to pay a fee to access. There are many of these in the marketplace—close to a hundred by our latest count. How can you tell the good ones from the bad ones? The following questions can help you evaluate a career assessment system you might be considering. Before making the leap, logging on, and entering your credit card number, think them through and make sure you have the info you need to make the right call.
For psychologists, reliability and validity serve as quality control criteria.
Reliability
The question of reliability is a critical one to ask of all measures. Formally, reliability is “the degree to which scores are free from unsystematic error.” If scores on a test are free from this, they’ll be consistent across related measurement. So, an easy way to think about reliability is the word “consistency.”
Note the word “unsystematic” in the definition. Scores on a measure may contain error but still be reliable. For example, if a thermometer is always 5 degrees low, it will be “reliable”–meaning consistent–but it’s inaccurate. Or, consider the case in which one professor is a harsh grader and one is a lenient grader. Each of them may be reliable, but one assigns grades that are systematically too low, and another gives grades that are systematically too high.
Types of Reliability
There are four primary types of reliability that psychologists use to evaluate an assessment’s scores. They are as follows:
1. Test-retest reliability. This is a measure of stability, and it asks the question: How stable are scores on the measure or test over time? Do you get the same results (or at least very close to the same) on two separate occasions? This is computed numerically using a correlation coefficient. The thing to keep in mind with test-retest reliability is that it only makes sense if the trait being measured is supposed to be stable. Most variables that career counselors want to assess (e.g., interests, values, personality, ability) are quite stable on average, once people reach early adulthood. (Otherwise it would make little sense to measure these things and use them to inform career decisions that may have long-term implications.)
2. Alternative forms reliability. This applies only to instruments for which there are two or more separate forms that are intended to be equivalent. For example, the SAT and ACT each have multiple forms. This is a measure of equivalence, and it asks this question: Do the two different versions of this measure give the same results? Are the two versions essentially the same? To test this, a test developer would administer the two versions of your assessment to the same people, and then calculate the correlation between these two sets of scores.
3. Internal Consistency Reliability. This is a measure of consistency within the test. How consistent are scores for the items on this test? Do all the items fit together? Do they all measure the same thing? There are two main types of internal reliability: split half and coefficent alpha.
4. Inter-rater reliability. Sometimes you measure things not with a paper and pencil measure that the participant completes, but by having other observers rate the participant’s behavior, such as in a behavioral assessment. Reliability is still important in this case, but it looks a little different. Now the question is whether the two (or more) raters agree with each other.
To establish evidence for inter-rater reliability, you would have two raters rate the same participants. Then you would calculate the relationship between the two raters. Once you have established evidence for inter-rater reliability, you can say confidently that the rating that occurred was consistent.
Validity
Sometimes validity is referred to as addressing the question “does the test measure what it is designed to measure?” A broader and more appropriate way to think about validity is referring to it as addressing the question “does the test accomplish its intended purpose?” or “does the test meet the claims made for it?”
Types of Validity
There are three primary types of validity that psychologists use to evaluate an assessment’s scores. (The list below has four types, but the first doesn’t really count.) They are as follows:
1. Face validity. This really isn’t validity in a scientific sense. If a measurement instrument has face validity, it just means it looks like it measures what it’s supposed to measure. If you have a measure of interests and the items look like they are tapping into a person’s interests, you have face validity. This can be good if it builds rapport with the test-taker, but it doesn’t have any real scientific value. All things being equal, it’s good if you have it, but it doesn’t mean that the measure is accomplishing its intended purpose.
2. Content validity. Content validity refers to how well an assessment covers all relevant aspects of the domain it is supposed to measure. Conceptually, you could ensure content validity if you could write items to cover absolutely every detail about your construct. For example, if a test developer wanted to measure a particular style of leadership, that developer could write every single item she could possibly think of that would be relevant to that leadership style. Then she could take a random sample of those items and include them in the scale. Unfortunately, this is not only impractical, it is impossible.
Often, content validity is assessed by expert judgment. You could assess the content validity of a measure by having an expert or experts examine the items and determine whether the items are a good representation of the entire universe of items. If the leadership style measure described above exam has low content validity, it would probably include a lot of items that aren’t relevant to that style, and it would probably leave out items that are very relevant to that style.
3. Criterion-related validity. This refers to how well an assessment correlates with performance or whatever other criterion you’re interested in. It answers the question of “do scores on the measure allow us to infer information about performance on some criterion?” There are two types of criterion validity: concurrent and predictive.
4. Construct validity. Construct validity most directly addresses the question of “does the test measure what it’s designed to measure?” It refers to how well the test assesses the underlying construct that is theorized. To demonstrate evidence of construct validity, a test developer would show that scores on her measure would have a strong relationship with certain variables (the ones that are very similar to what is being measured) and a weak relationship with other variables (those that are conceptualized as being dissimilar to the construct being measured). There are two types: convergent and discriminant.
NOTE: An instrument’s scores can be reliable but not valid. However, if an instrument’s scores are not reliable, there is no way that they can be valid.
Why does this matter? If you want to know how “good” a career assessment is, ask this question: “What is the evidence of reliability and validity?” A counselor should be able to answer this question, and an online assessment portal should provide some basic information (and links to more detailed information) to show that its scores provide good information. If no information about a particular test can be found, we’d encourage you to avoid that assessment instrument, or at the very least to view scores generated by that assessment in only the most tentative way.
As we note in Chapter 4 of Make Your Job a Calling, most people agree that experiencing a positive sense of meaning—defined as “the sense made of, and significance felt regarding,the nature of one’s being and existence”[1]—is fundamental to living “the good life.” Yet how many take serious steps toward living meaningfully at work? One way to think through this question is to evaluate how well your career goals fit within the context of your life goals. Try this: for starters, think about your life as a whole. What, ultimately, is most important to you? How would you describe your life’s purpose? With answers to these questions in mind, list at least five life goals you are currently pursuing. (We recommend you write these down, either here, in a journal, or on a separate sheet.)
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Next, think carefully about your career for a moment—your current job situation, the kind of work you most want to do, and the steps you need to take to bridge the gap between these, if there is one. How close or far away are you from where you want to be? What role do you want your career to play within the broader context of your life? With your answers to these questions in mind, list at least five career goals you are currently pursuing:
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Now look closely at the goals you listed above for your life and your career. To what extent are your career goals in line with your life goals? Are you happy with your answer to this question? If not, what needs to change?
[1] M. F. Steger, Patricia Frazier, Shigehiro Oishi, and Matthew Kaler, “The Meaning in Life Questionnaire: Assessing the Presence of and Search for Meaning in Life,” Journal of Counseling Psychology 53.1 [2006]: 80–93, 81.
Make Your Job a Calling 