Education and Career Choice A New Model of Decision Making

Education and Career Choice reports on a UK research project that offers a new perspective on post-sixteen transitions. Following the emerging 'new political arithmetic' approach, a synthesis of secondary data is combined with the collection and analysis of narrative accounts to both describe how young people make education and career choices, and to relate this to contextual factors and recent historical trends. Unlike most recent research in the area, it presents a model of the decision making that is both dynamic and unconstrained by currently fashionable, yet fundamentally problematic, theoretical concepts. The research findings are accompanied by a thorough critique of the methods of data collection and analysis used in several highly influential studies, and many commonly accepted substantive findings are shown to be unwarranted. Book jacket.

PATRICK WHITE is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology, University of Leicester.