Social Cognitive Career Theory, the Theory of Work Adjustment, and Work Satisfaction of Retirement-Age Adults

Influences of Financial and Workplace Factors on Physical Therapist Job Satisfaction

OBJECTIVE

The physical therapist labor market has recently noted higher rates of turnover and job vacancies. An understudied factor contributing to these trends in the profession is job satisfaction. The profession continues to experience relatively low wages compared with other health professions, and graduates of Doctor of Physical Therapy programs face increasingly high student debt. This study used the labor-search model as a conceptual framework to understand associations between job satisfaction, income, and educational debt. The purpose of this study is to observe the financial and workplace factors that are associated with higher levels of physical therapist job satisfaction.

METHODS

Data from 4764 physical therapists in 1 state were captured retrospectively through the state's licensure renewal process from 2014 to 2020. A random effects panel analysis, with job satisfaction as the dependent variable, was used to evaluate the relationships between job satisfaction and income, educational debt, and a variety of work-related factors.

RESULTS

Job satisfaction was negatively correlated with educational debt, number of hours worked per week, and some practice settings. Conversely, job satisfaction was positively correlated with the expected age of retirement. The percentage of time spent in research and administration was also positively correlated with job satisfaction, though additional research in this area is needed to draw meaningful conclusions on this association.

CONCLUSION

The results support the conceptual framework, which suggests that early career physical therapists, motivated by high amounts of educational debt, may choose more financially advantageous practice settings and increased working hours to the detriment of job satisfaction.

IMPACT

High levels of job satisfaction among physical therapists are correlated with low levels of educational debt, working 45 hours or less per week, a longer time horizon until retirement, and practice settings other than home health and skilled nursing facilities.

Clarifying Work Values through Seasonal Employment: An Instrumental Case Study of Summer Camp Employment

Emerging adults need opportunities to clarify their work values. Although researchers have examined how transitions and work experiences influence emerging adults’ work values and job choices, less is known about how seasonal employment shapes work values. Using the theory of work adjustment as a guide, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 20–27 year-olds (n = 76; mage = 22.03, SD = 1.82) to understand how their seasonal employment at summer camps influenced their work values. We found that seasonal camp employment aligned with and helped participants clarify their desire for dynamic work that makes a difference and that offers a supportive social environment with adequate work-life balance. Our findings suggest that seasonal employment affords emerging adults important opportunities to discover, reinforce, and prune work values in a temporary employment setting. We conclude by discussing implications for emerging adults’ career development and offer suggestions for career counselors.

Reconceptualizing retirement: A status-based approach

The one thing on which essentially all retirement scholars agree is that there is no generally accepted definition of the term "retirement." Hence, it is not surprising that a plethora of competing models of the stages of retirement has been generated. To cut this Gordian knot, this paper proposes that the concept of statuses, which are not necessarily mutually exclusive or sequential, replace the idea of stages. Statuses better reflect observed human behavior and are more open to multicultural application, thus facilitating retirement research and clinical practice. The retirement statuses proposed here, which can exist in any combination or sequence, are retrenchment, exploration, try-out, involvement, reconsideration, and exiting (forming the acronym RETIRE).