The Role of Emotional Experiences in Commitment Development in Internship Students

In this study I address the relation between real-time experiences and vocational identity development in psychology students during their practical internship. By means of a multi-method approach I aimed to shed light on the role of salient emotional experiences in commitment development, and on the characteristics of these experiences. In a diary study internship students reported every week about their most relevant experience. For each student the most salient positive and negative emotional experience was selected. Most positive and negative experiences concerned competence-related issues. Salient emotional experiences were related to commitment change for a prolonged period of time. In line with the theoretical models, salient positive emotional experiences enhance the commitment strength, and salient negative emotional experiences reduce the strength. However, many experiences include different characteristics. In particular, negative emotional experiences are characterized by a diversity of both positive and negative characteristics.</p

The relation between vocational commitment and need fulfillment in real time experiences in clinical internships

This study concerns the question how specific characteristics of real-time experiences relate to commitment change. The focus is on the real-time fulfillment of the basic needs: the need for competence, for relatedness and for autonomy. The research question was: “What is the relation between real time need fulfillment and commitment in psychology students during their practical internships?” The participants were 56 master students who did a five-month clinical internship in psychology. The participants wrote at least 19 weekly diary reports (in a period of 5 months) about the most important experience in their internship in that week, and in addition they filled in a short questionnaire. With a linear mixed model analysis, the relation was analyzed between need fulfillment and commitment on an individual and on a group level. The basic needs were found to be a relevant characteristic of experiences: need fulfillment or need frustration was described in by far most experiences. Experiences with a positive need fulfillment were related to higher levels of commitment strength than experiences that concerned frustration of need fulfillment, or that did not report need fulfillment. This pattern of relations was found in 90% of the individual participants. The experiences of the atypical 10% of the participants reflected a non-optimal relationship with their internship or supervisor

The effects of career choice guidance on identity development

We investigated the effects of a student career choice guidance on identity development. We compared the levels of identity development before and after the guidance. In addition we compared the identity development of the participants with a norm group of the same age and educational level. Following the guidance we found—as expected—that the participants showed a significant increase in commitment strength in the vocational and personal domains and in global identity. The effect size was moderate. The participants showed significantly higher increase levels than did the norm group. The initial commitment strength in the group with career choice problems was lower as compared to the norm group in the vocational and personal domain but not in the global identity