Job Satisfaction Calling and Life Satisfaction: It's not about Having It, It's about Living It - Article Example

Job Satisfaction Calling and Life Satisfaction: It's not about Having It, It's about Living It Article Critique of Overview The subject of interest of this study was career satisfaction. The article was interesting because it compared the idea of career satisfaction as a calling or just a job that someone was doing. What the authors found was that those people who saw their career as a calling were sometimes more satisfied than those who did not see it this way. The authors provided several definitions for calling that included a job that is done to help others and provides personal meaning to the person who is doing the job, a job that was destined by God or a higher power that brought personal satisfaction to an individual that serves a larger purpose, or a job that compels someone to do it because it is their destiny (Duffy, Allan, Autin, & Bott, 2013).

The definition of calling was very useful, and putting it in the beginning of the article was very helpful. For a new reader of these types of journals, it was very important to define what the authors were talking about so that the reader would be able to follow their study. Also, I had always heard the word calling as something that God ordained someone to do. Many people I know have said this as they were doing their jobs. The fact that there is more than one way to define calling made sense to me because people feel many different ways about their job.

An interesting point made by the authors was that many people seem to be more committed to a particular career if they felt a calling to it. The authors also said that the majority of studies done prior to the current one were centered on job satisfaction, and this is related to work outcomes. The authors state that there was less information in the literature on how calling relates to life satisfaction. The Authors’ Study Duffy et al. (2013) studied how calling relates to life satisfaction; their focus was more on adults rather than students.

The authors proposed three hypotheses before they began their study. The first hypothesis was that people would feel most satisfied if they thought their job was a calling. They also suggested that life satisfaction is not met if the individual feels they are not fulfilling their calling. The second hypothesis that Duffy et al. (2013) stated was that “job satisfaction and life meaning” (p. 43) meant that if a person felt good about their job and saw it as a calling, they would have stronger life satisfaction.

The third hypothesis stated that job satisfaction would relate to life satisfaction when an individual felt that they were satisfying a calling. The three hypotheses were very important to the study because they provided a foundation for what the authors were going to do. They explained in detail their hypotheses and in terms that anyone reading the article could understand. They did not use a large vocabulary that would stop the reader from understanding what they were going to do. This use of regular language provided a way for anyone to understand the study.

Participants Duffy et al. (2013) chose 553 adults who were working in the United States. Of all the participants, 288 were females and 261 were males. The majority of participants worked full-time and was white (84%) while the rest of the participants comprised many different ethnic groups (Asian, Middle Eastern, African-American to name a few). The age group of the participants was intended to be 18-64, but the average age was about 31 years of age. There was a category of income levels that ranged between less than $25,000 to over $200,000 per year.

Critique Although this article was interesting, it was very statistical when the authors began to discuss the differences in their results. I also thought that it was biased because 84% of their participants were white. This meant to me that this was more a study about white people and how they perceived a calling. Pannucci and Wilkins (2011) state that there are many ways that bias can be shown in a study. One way is through the recruitment of patients. I saw this as the recruitment of any participants.

When Duffy et al. (2013) chose a small portion of the population to study, I felt they did not give a realistic picture of what calling meant to different populations. Although this may not have been their intent, in the abstract they said that their study showed how job satisfaction was linked to calling, but in reality it was only linked to one group. The reader is lead to believe that this research is valuable to anyone dealing with workers and that it will help counselors and organizations decide how to approach their workers.

However, it does not really portray how calling looks to different cultures. The authors do suggest that there are several limitations to their study and one is that it could not be used for cross cultural study. I liked that the article was easy to read, except the results section where they had to use statistical information, which I found difficult to understand. I am concerned that a study of different cultural groups would be valuable, as well as a study which observes a longer period of time would be necessary before any real conclusions about the link between job satisfaction and calling could be drawn.

References Duffy, R. D., Allan, B. A., Autin, K. L., & Bott, E. M. (2013). Calling and life satisfaction: It's not about having it, it's about living it. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 60(1), 42-52. doi:10.1037/a0030635 Pannucci, C. J., and Wilkins, E. G. (2011). Identifying and avoiding bias in research. Plastic Reconstruction Surgery, 12(2). 619-625. DOI: 10.1097/PRS.0b013e3181de24bc Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2917255/