| 英文摘要 |
In Taiwan, medical doctors have enjoyed privileged socioeconomic status since the Japanese colonial period. Although the prestige of doctoral professions has been challenged by changes in the medical environment and the introduction of the National Health Insurance program, most elite students are still expected to pursue a career in medicine and commit to it. The annual lists of students admitted to medical schools are widely discussed in the media, and they have also become something that high school rankings are based on. These medical students are often found to share similar backgrounds. In addition, there are numerous parent–child or sibling combinations in the field of medicine and even medical families that have produced multiple generations of medical doctors. In such instances, human capital, including property and nonmonetary rewards, is transferred within the family. Although no obvious barriers exist, the path to becoming a medical doctor requires more than well-defined interests or values. Individuals must ace the college entrance test, attend a competitive medical school, acquire comprehensive and systematic knowledge and skills, and pass a series of licensing examinations. Throughout the long and stressful process, the role of intergenerational transfer and the selection of information should not be underestimated. Studies have indicated that within the multigenerational transmission process, individuals’ development as well as families’ interaction patterns must be identified. Moreover, in the East-Asian social context of Taiwan, in addition to the person’s personality characteristics, career decision making often reflects occupational prestige and parental expectations. Therefore, both psychological factors and sociocultural contexts must be considered to understand individuals’ career choices. This study applied the “Integrative process systems perspective” to investigate the influence of a Taiwanese threegeneration medical family on its offspring’s career development in the family’s interaction. Employing narrative inquiry as the method, this study explored the experiences of members across time and space with integrated and dynamic characteristics. Serial interviews were conducted with the grandfather and father, who were doctors, and with the son, who was still a student currently majoring in medicine. They were asked to talk about the family’s interaction as well as career choice, including their impressive familial stories, their experiences of career exploration, tendencies toward a specific occupation in different stages of development, the timepoint of commitment, the reason and meaning of becoming a doctor, and the family’s interaction patterns before and after members become a doctor. The category-content method was then used to analyze the factors of family interaction affecting an individual’s career decision making and intergenerational transmission. With the participants’ emotions, meanings, needs, perceptions, and awareness of situations, this study attempted to disclose an individual’s identity under “who I was,” “who I am,” and “who I will be” and also to reveal familial and social cultures. The purpose was to present the process of intergenerational career transmission on the medical family and outline the complete construction. In this study, the researcher was responsible for interviews, data transcription, analysis, and interpretation. To avoid the subjective bias of the researcher and establish credibility, a co-analyzer was invited to examine the process and product of the inquiry, determining validity in terms of logicality and persuasiveness. The results of the study revealed that intergenerational career transmission in the medical family was a process of interplay between family subsystems, embedded in social culture, which strived for harmonies between the maintenance of consistency and introduction of change. Individual family members were also mutually influenced by each other. The transfer of cognition and feeling led to the son’s decision to follow in the footsteps of his grandfather and father. In other words, intergenerational career transmission had characteristics of systems, processing, and integration. It was a continually changing, adapting, and spreading process. 1. A cultural trait of Taiwanese society is that a career in medicine is highly preferred. The career-selection process for the son was influenced by society, time, and the environment. Society attributes prominent significance to the profession of medical doctor, building the stage for an individual’s career-selection process. Identifying with the significance of social prominence, the family created an environment of self-discipline that valued academic achievement and strictly regulated the scope and time for an individual’s career exploration. The family gradually conformed to mainstream values and encouraged their children to strive for a career in medicine. 2. Intergenerational career transmission included the influence between two interplaying models: a social model and a parental model. Moreover, parents and their offspring were mutually influenced by each other at the family level. Each factor cannot be separated, and all should be considered in the context. 3. In the social model, the establishment of highly praised social prominence affected individuals’ identification with a career in medicine. Children’s career choice was influenced directly by accepting the viewpoint of social prominence or indirectly by the awareness of their parent’s values. In the parental model, parental identification with social prominence led to the formation of familial meanings. The parents continually implied the positive information of the doctoral profession and proceeded to develop the family’s “unique meaning” of altruism. This unique meaning encouraged the children to acquire competencies required in the field, accelerated the career-selection process, and brought forward the timepoint of commitment. Both “social prominence” in the social model and “unique meaning” in the parental model affected the transmission of values interactively. 4. The Taiwanese medical family was a marital-and-maternal-oriented system based on boundaries, rules, and career achievements. The family reinforced the unity of husbands and wives. Both spouses in each generation cooperated in domestic life but stressed the maternal career. The husbands were the role models for the children but spent most of their time at work. On the other hand, the wives assumed more responsibility for caring for and parenting the children. Well-demarcated boundaries and precise rules between subsystems and individuals in the family system, accompanying the family’s emphasis on the children’s academic achievement, promoted their offspring’s pursuit of a career in medicine. Based on these findings, this study produced several discussions and provided suggestions for those working in counseling practice or related research. Career choice is not a simple process of matching an individual with an occupation and was influenced by the systematic context, the individual himself or herself, and the relationship. Therefore, in addition to an individual’s independence and autonomy, local counseling practitioners should consider the impacts of social culture, internal and external familial resources, and the awareness of an individual’s experiences in each stage of development. This study mainly focused on the phenomenon of intergenerational career transmission in a medical family. Thus, career decision making regarding a career in medicine was emphasized in the interviews. Apart from this topic, wives in the system were found to have quit their own careers immediately and fully support their husbands’ careers after marriage. The family also used different parenting styles depending on the sex of the children. Moreover, a third-generation daughter did not choose a career in medicine. From the perspective of a family system, the following questions are raised: what is the career-selection process of these nonmedical profession members? Is there any difference between sons and daughters? In the process, how did mental functioning and accommodation work? Future research should investigate the sex difference, mental functioning and accommodation of nonmedical profession members, and career-selection process of children who have not pursued a career in medicine. |
本站僅提供期刊文獻檢索。
