The purpose of this study was to explore the relationships between process aspects of adolescent career development and the dynamic, family dimensions of adaptability and cohesion. Drawing from Super’s career development model, Tiedeman and O’Hara’s vocational decision-making model, Haren’s career decision-making paradigm and Olson et al’s. Circumplex Model of Marriage and Family Systems, curvilinear relationships were predicted between career development process variables and family adaptability-family cohesion.

Adolescents in the study sample were 262 volunteer, high school seniors enrolled in three high schools (a rural, an urban, and a suburban) located in Southwest Virginia. Three summary hypotheses were tested by applying multiple regression analysis procedures. In the regression models examined, the criterion career development variables included: career decision-making style, occupational commitment, career planning, career exploration, decision-making and world-of-work information. The predictor variables consisted of family adaptability, family cohesion and related subdimension variables. The Assessment of Career Decision-Making and The Career Development Inventory were used to measure the criterion variables while the predictor variables were measured by the Family Adaptability and Cohesion Evaluation Scales.

Hypothesis testing produced the following essential outcomes: (1) Six significant regression coefficients, distributed through four regression models, indicated that higher family adaptability (change) tendencies were associated with higher intuitive decision-making style levels, lower decision-making knowledge attained, adn lower world-of-work information acquired; whereas higher family cohesion (closeness) was related to more favorable career planning attitudes and higher measured levels of decision-making and world-of-work knowledge; (2) For the total sample, only the decision-making and world-of-work knowledge scales of the CDI were found to be significantly related to both family adaptability and family cohesion collectively; (3) a basic tenet of the Circumplex Model was challenged as no regression models examined yielded significant curvilinear relationships between the criterion and predictor variables; (4) The major dimensions of the Circumplex Model, family adaptability and cohesion were found to be correlated measures, a finding which also contradicted the Circumplex Model; and (5) Supplementary results provided partial explanations for some of the essential findings as well as supporting previous findings reported in the literature.