Redirection: Using Career Development Theory to Interpret the Volunteer Activities of Retirees
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this study was to examine formal volunteering among retirees in order to explore whether their volunteer experiences represent an extension of their career in the paid workforce or whether their volunteer activities represent a completely new direction, and how this influences their career self-concept, as interpreted through Donald Super’s life-span, life-space theory of career development. This study employed a developmental mixed-method design. In Phase 1, qualitative interviews were conducted with 12 participants to better understand retirees’ volunteer experiences. Phase 1 informed the design of an instrument for the Phase 2 survey which examined the issues among a larger sample of 214 retirees. The Phase 2 results supported the Phase 1 findings and indicated that many retirees sought an extension of career in volunteer activities in that they used similar skills and knowledge. Study participants also displayed a desire for lifelong learning. Retirees relinquished their paid-work career, took on the retiree and volunteer roles, and integrated these roles within their career self-concept to create a new sense of self. These results indicated that the retirees had entered a new stage of life, qualitatively different from ‘retirement’. To better reflect the experiences of these retirees, it was proposed that Donald Super’s life-span, life-space theory of career development be extended to include Redirection. This theorizing is consistent with the finding that retirees both wanted to and are able to integrate previous paid work elements as well as seek out lifelong learning opportunities within their volunteer activities. This study demonstrates that the volunteer role in the lives of retirees can lead to personal renewal and reshaping of the career self-concept, or what is labeled as the stage of Redirection. This study also has implications for volunteer management, retirement planning and social policy, and may be of interest to volunteer managers, nonprofit organizations, career counsellors, financial planners, retirement planning consultants, life coaches and policy planners.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".