An Introduction to “Life Roles”

By Robert E. Straby

What are “Life-Roles”?

Donald Super’s (1910-1994)¹ theory of career development has influenced a generation of career development practitioners. Super’s concept of “career” is very broad. It includes the sequence of activities that a person does during the course of a lifetime, which includes pre-occupational, occupational, a-vocational, and post-occupational roles–all the positions that a person occupies.

Super described nine major “positions” or life roles that individuals may adopt in their lifetime:

• Child
• Student
• Leisurite
• Citizen
• Worker
• Spouse
• Homemaker
• Parent
• Pensioner

Not everyone will take on all of these roles, of course, but it is readily seen that Super intended much more than mere “work” when he discussed careers. In fact, “worker” is only one of the life roles.  To Super, all of the life roles interact with each other; to examine any life role in isolation is to miss the point of Super’s concept of career. Also, Super conceived each of the life roles to change with development. The parent life role, for example, takes on various forms as children grow up, enter school, leave home and enter the work force. As each of the life roles increases or decreases in importance, other life roles are affected.  Thus, a person beginning the spouse life role, while strongly pursuing the worker life role, may neglect the life roles of the leisurite, citizen and student.

What is work “salience”? The practices of career development are useful to career counsellors and their clients only when work is important to the clients. Super used the term work salience to refer to the importance of work within an individual’s life. Individuals with low work salience have lower interest in work; however, they may be very involved and adaptive within other life roles (e.g., parent, student).  To Super, it is important for career counsellors to remember that work isnot of utmost importance to everyone. Some individuals use work merely for the purpose of having sufficient funds to do what they want to do in other life roles.  It is important for career counsellors to assess a client’s level of salience for their life roles. This helps to ensure that planning in one area (e.g. career) can be kept in balance with the needs of other roles (e.g. parenting).

The Life Role Checklist²

The following page provides a helpful tool to assess what a client’s current life roles needs and priorities are.

Life Career Roles Checklist

1. Circle the italicised key word for the major roles you are NOW playing.
2. To rate the satisfaction level you feel in each role, use a scale of 1 – 10 with 1 being Very Dissatisfied, 5 being Fairly Satisfied and 10 being Very Satisfied, enter this into the line on the right hand column of the page.
3. Prioritise the roles (on the left hand side) in their order of importance to you, (e.g. Parent = 1, Worker = 2, etc.).

In which career/life role would you most like to make change?

How might you make this change?

¹ Super, D.E. & Savickas, M.L. & Super, C.M. (1996). The Life-Span, Life-Space Approach to Careers. In D. Brown & L. Brooks (Eds.), Career Choice and Development. Third Edition. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass

² Compiled by R.E. Straby, 2001-2003

Rob Straby has followed his passion for the innovation and development of state of the art career systems for fifteen years. He serves as faculty for the Career Development Certificates at Conestoga College and Concordia University College.