THE HIDDEN SELECTION OF THE OCCUPATIONAL APPEAL: THE PARADIGM OF NURSES

Abstract

Traditionally, the process of choosing a vocation has been presented as the matching of a person's interests and aptitudes with occupational requirements. Maintaining the individual's role as an agent in the process of “self‐selection into an occupation” (Krech, Crutchfield and Ballachey, 1962), one ought to give attention not only to the push‐ but also to the pull‐ factors, i.e. to the occupational appeal which embodies the occupation's motivational “valence” (to use the term coined for a social context by Lewin, Dembo, Festinger and Sears, 1944).