ABSTRACT
This chapter describes a study of the reasons that a group of highly educated women gave for changes in their employment situation over the course of their careers. For example, reasons for present job changes might influence future work experience or might be the result of prior work experience. One of the objectives of this chapter is to develop a more fine-grained way to code actors' reasons for their own job changes. In order to differentiate between different types of reasons, the present study elected to begin with "a careful analysis of language expressions" in order to arrive at concepts that will enable the reader to clarify the implicit relations among words referring to psychological phenomena. Correlation and factor analyses were performed on the reason scores to check on the validity of this assumption. The usual psychological interpretation of changes in personal history is to see them as distorting the facts.
