Work in People's Lives: A Location for Counseling Psychologists

The career development-vocational psychology literature has been marked by 2 persistent problems: a slow response to new developments in basic areas of psychology, such as developmental psychology, and a lack of representation of populations other than White and middle-class groups as research participants or as foci of theoretical explanation. After a brief discussion of 2 factors that may have contributed to these problems, a rationale for a new location for this field is developed. The new location focuses on the study of work in people's lives from the perspective of social constructionism and from the perspective of counseling psychologists as applied psychologists.