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This study conceptualizes and investigates career-relevant parent-child conversations and other actions over time as a family project. Dyads composed of a parent and an adolescent from 20 families participated in a videotaped career-related conversation to determine a family career-development project that was subsequently monitored for a 6-month period and followed up with a 2nd videotaped conversation. On the basis of a systematic qualitative analysis, several dimensions were identified as facilitating the family career-development project, including joint goals, communication, goals-steps congruence, and individuation. These family career-development projects were organized as part of broader relationship, identity, parenting, and cultural projects that also played a decisive role in the success of the family career-development projects themselves.

The qualitative action-project method is described as an appropriate and heuristic qualitative research method for use in counseling psychology. Action theory, which addresses human intentional, goaldirected action, project, and career, provides the conceptual framework for the method. Data gathering and analysis involve multiple procedures to access information from 3 perspectives: manifest behavior, internal processes, and social meaning. The method has a number of advantages, including its conceptualization, which is close to human experience; its systematic data gathering and analysis procedures; its usefulness in describing processes of interest to counseling psychologists; and its uniqueness among qualitative research methods.

This paper re-examines career theories and notes a number of their shortcomings which derive from a lack of rigor in approach and from certain epistemological and methodological considerations. The way forward suggested for this field of study represents a shift in the root hypothesis from organicism and mechanism to contextualism. The ecological, the biographical, and the hermeneutical approaches are proposed as a means of reconceptualizing this area of study.

The findings of an international workshop on improving clinical interactions between mental health workers and suicidal patients are reported. Expert clinician-researchers identified common contemporary problems in interviews of suicide attempters. Various videotaped interviews of suicide attempters were critically discussed in relation to expert experience and the existing literature in this area. The working group agreed that current mental health practice often does not take into account the subjective experience of patients attempting suicide, and that contemporary clinical assessments of suicidal behavior are more clinician-centered than patient-centered. The group concluded that clinicians should strive for a shared understanding of the patient's suicidality; and that interviewers should be more aware of the suicidal patient's inner experience of mental pain and loss of self-respect. Collaborative and narrative approaches to the suicidal patient are more promising, enhancing the clinician's ability to empathize and help the patient begin to reestablish a sense of mastery, thereby strengthening the clinical alliance.