The Career Development of Rural Queensland Children
Australian Journal of Career Development, 2007
The present study examined the occupational aspirations and career development influences of chil... more The present study examined the occupational aspirations and career development influences of children attending Years 6 and 7 at a sample of rural and remote primary schools in the central western region of Queensland. Data was collected by means of the Revised Career Awareness Survey (McMahon & Patton, 2001). Australian and New Zealand Standard Classification of Occupations (ANZSCO) codes were used to analyse the participants' occupational aspirations and the Systems Theory Framework categories were used to analyse the influences on their career development. The children's occupational aspirations were compared with state and regional labour market information. Recommendations related to career development interventions in the context of the school, family and community and future research are made.
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Papers by Kylie Rixon
factors that assisted the collaborative process: communication, knowledge, role clarity and resources. The second dimension considers the challenges presented to collaborative work when a parent has a mental illness and a child is in need of protection, and identifies issues that are inherent in cases of this kind. Two types of challenge were identified. The first related to characteristics of mental illness,
and included the episodic and/or unpredictable nature of mental illness, incorporating information from psychiatric and parenting capacity assessments, and the provision of ongoing support. The second type of challenge concerned the tension between the conflicting needs of parents and their children, and how this was viewed from both the adult mental health and the child protection perspective. Implications for policy and practice are identified in relation to the need for service models that provide ongoing, flexible support that can be intensified or held back as needed.
Method: A self-administered, cross-sectional survey was developed and distributed via direct mail or via line supervisors to workers in statutory child protection services, adult mental health services, child and youth mental health services, and Suspected Child Abuse and Neglect (SCAN) Teams. There were 232 completed questionnaires returned, with an overall response rate of 21%. Thirty-eight percent of respondents were statutory child protection workers, 39% were adult mental health workers, 16% were child and youth mental health workers, and 4% were SCAN Team medical officers with 3% missing data).
Results: Analysis revealed that workers were engaging in a moderate amount of interagency contact, but that they were unhappy with the support provided by their agency. Principle components analysis and multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) on items assessing attitudes toward other workers identified four factors, which differed in rates of endorsement: inadequate training, positive regard for child protection workers, positive regard for mental health workers, and mutual mistrust (from highest to lowest level of endorsement). The same procedure identified the relative endorsement of five factors extracted from items about potential barriers: inadequate resources, confidentiality, gaps in interagency processes, unrealistic expectations, and professional knowledge domains and boundaries.