Building Careers That Bounce Back: A New Measure of Career Resilience (SYCRA Scale/Systems-Based Career Resilience Assessment) for Working Adults in U.S.
Career resilience is increasingly recognized as essential for navigating the complexities anduncertainties of contemporary work environments. However, existing scholarship has primarily emphasized individual traits while overlooking the broader contextual and systemic factors that shape career resilience processes. This two-chapter/two-study dissertation addresses this gap through two complementary studies: (1) a scoping review of career resilience literature and (2) the development and initial validation of a new systems-based measure of career resilience grounded in the Systems Theory Framework (STF; McMahon & Patton, 1995). The first study is a scoping review of empirical research examining antecedents, predictors, and barriers of career resilience among working adults in the United States. Following a systematic search across seven databases, thirteen studies met the inclusion criteria from an initial pool of 2,154 records. Findings indicated that career resilience has been examined using cross-sectional, quasi-experimental, and qualitative designs across diverse occupational contexts. Key contributors to career resilience included interpersonal relationships, individual skills, and personal values, whereas organizational constraints, emotional strain, and systemic inequities emerged as primary barriers. The review also highlighted inconsistencies in the conceptualization and measurement of career resilience and identified significant gaps in the literature, particularly regarding contextual and structural influences. Building on these findings, the second study developed and validated the 22-item Systems-Based Career Resilience Assessment (SYCRA), a multidimensional measure assessing career resilience across individual, social, and environmental/societal system domains. Scale development followed a four-phase process involving expert reviewers (n = 5), a focus group session with U.S. employed adults (n = 8), a pilot study with U.S. employed adults (n = 86), and a validation study (n = 304) with U.S. employed adults recruited via Prolific. Exploratory factor analysis supported a three-factor structure consistent with STF, and confirmatory factor analysis demonstrated acceptable model fit (CFI = .92, TLI = .91, RMSEA = .060, SRMR = .076). The scale demonstrated strong internal consistency (α = .89) and evidence of convergent, discriminant, and criterion validity. Together, these studies advance the conceptualization of career resilience by integrating empirical literature with the development of a theoretically grounded, systems-based measurement tool. The findings underscore the importance of moving beyond individual-level perspectives to incorporate social and environmental/societal systems in understanding and assessing career resilience. The SYCRA provides a novel instrument for research, practice, and policy aimed at fostering more comprehensive and equitable approaches to career development. Keywords: career resilience, vocational psychology, Systems Theory Framework, scale development, scoping review
career resilience, career resilience scale, scale development, scoping review, Systems Theory Framework, vocational psychology
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