Charting Graduates’ Life Trajectories
This project investigated changes in students’ perceptions of their aspirations, attainments, problems and threats during the six months following graduation. We named it ‘The LEP Study’ because all of the participants were recruited from the ‘Life, Environment and People’ course at the University of Bath.
Graduation from university often represents a major transition and can be a significant turning point in a person’s life trajectory. We used innovative research methods, derived from our Telic (purpose oriented) conceptual framework, to investigate graduates’ experiences of this transition.
We elicited students’ perceptions of their Telic Attractors (aspirations and attainments) and Repellers (problems and threats) at the time of graduation, and tracked changes in these perceptions during the following six months. Questionnaire responses revealed that, even though the investigation spanned a relatively short period of time, there were substantial changes in the perceived actualisation of the Telic items (aspirations were attained, attainments were lost, problems were solved, and threats materialised) during this period. There were also substantial changes in participants’ perceptions of the relevance and importance of these Telic Attractors and Repellers; some of the original items were abandoned, and new ones were introduced.
Follow-up interviews were used to investigate participants’ explanations for these changes. By focusing the interviews upon the structure and dynamics of Telic Attractors and Repellers, we were able to explore salient features of the participants’ experiences, as they negotiated the transition between undergraduate life and the ‘world of work’.
The findings of this study revealed marked individual differences in participants’ use of Telic items: some participants, who could be described as ‘charting and negotiating a progressive course’, deployed them as ‘navigational resources’; others, whose lack of a clear direction after graduation left them ‘drifting aimlessly in limbo’, appeared to use the Telic items merely as a form of ‘onboard entertainment’ – something to expound and fantasise about, rather than to address in practice.
The results of this study suggested that similar research methods could be deployed effectively and productively in a wide range of future investigations.
The findings of the project have been presented in the following conference paper:
Williams, R.V. & Whitmarsh, L.E. Charting Graduates’ Life Trajectories: Aspirations, Attainments, Problems and Threats as Navigational Resources or Onboard Entertainment. Presented at the British Psychological Society Social Psychology Section Conference, Birmingham, September 2006.
