ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the conceptual, psychometric, and empirical contributions of a group of theoreticians and researchers gathered together under the leadership of Donald E. Super in the early 1950s at Columbia University. In response to a study conducted by Ginzberg, Ginsburg, Axelrad, and Herma (1951), which proposed a developmental schema of career decision making, but which was based on cross-sectional data, Super (1955) launched the Career Pattern Study, a 20-year longitudinal investigation of career maturity from the 9th grade to age 35, which initiated several other projects focused on age related trends in vocational behavior. Among these was that of the writer (Crites, 1964, 1973, 1974b, 1978), who constructed a standardized inventory to measure the various dimensions of career maturity and who traced changes in the scores on this instrument (Career Maturity Inventory–CMI) across the period from grade 7 to grade 12 for both males and females. In the discussion that follows, the “Concept of Career Development” is first explicated, then the “Measurement of Career Development” is presented, with a final section on the “Results from a Six-Year Longitudinal Study of Career Maturity.”
