as well. Furthermore, one can see why individuals who are nur-
tured in consistent, caring environments in which independent
thought and actions are encouraged tend to develop strong, stable
self-concepts, whereas individuals, who experience capricious, abu-
sive, neglecting, or dependent environments often develop weak,
unstable self-concepts.
Development of Occupational Knowledge. The extent of differen-
tiation and complexity of occupational knowledge has a direct bear-
ing on one’s capability for identifying appropriate choices at any
given point in time (Neimeyer, 1988, 1992; Nevill, Neimeyer,
Probert, & Fukuyama, 1986). Structurally, a schema in the occu-
pational knowledge domain may be envisioned as a hierarchy of em-
bedded knowledge (Rummelhart & Ortony, 1976) or as ideational
scaffolding (Anderson, 1984; Anderson, Osborn, & Tierney, 1984)
in which concepts (for example, “carpenter”) are related to superor-
dinate concepts (“construction workers”) or to subordinate concepts
(“uses hammer; uses saw”). The hierarchical structure of occupational
knowledge schemata allows most individuals to organize knowledge
about the world of work and, therefore, to think and converse effec-
tively about occupations. When someone uses the word carpenterin
a sentence (“My father is a carpenter”), a substructure of related con-
cepts becomes accessible in memory without having to actually be
said. The extent of these memory substructures depends on a person’s
degree of familiarity with the concept “carpenter.” Without some
mechanism for connecting concepts in an orderly and systematic
manner, we would be unable to think, communicate, or problem
solve. An individual’s ability to derive relationships between occu-
pational knowledge and self-knowledge precisely and accurately is
related to the breadth, depth, complexity, and organization of sche-
mata within the occupational knowledge domain.
The acquisition of occupational knowledge may be thought of
as a constructive process in which an individual continually creates
new knowledge units from combining existing knowledge with new
information (Mahoney, 1991; Piaget, 1977; Rummelhart & Ortony,
322 CAREER CHOICE AND DEVELOPMENT