Life Roles, Values, and Careers: International Findings of the Work Importance Study

The Work Importance Study (WIS) was an international collaborative project coordinated by Super, involving research teams in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Croatia, Italy, Japan, Poland, Portugal, South Africa, and the United States . The central finding, according to the publisher's summary, is that values are universal and stable across cultures, and that fulfillment of personal potential is a life goal cutting through boundaries of culture, status, and gender . The study used a cross-national measure indigenous to each participating country, exploring how individual values are expressed in different roles and settings—work, play, and school .

The WIS identified five major life roles: student, worker, homemaker, leisurite, and citizen . The Role Salience Inventory was developed to measure the relative importance of these roles to individuals. Alija Kulenović and Super co-authored the cross-national chapter on 'The Five Major Life Roles Viewed Cross-Nationally' . The findings revealed that role hierarchies were remarkably consistent across countries, though specific patterns of role commitment varied by national context and demographic factors. The study also examined role salience in employment and unemployment, comparing Canada, Belgian Flanders, and Italy .

The Work Importance Study was the empirical culmination of Super's life-span, life-space theory, which he had been developing since the 1950s. While The Psychology of Careers (1957) established the developmental stages and self-concept implementation, and Career Development: Self-Concept Theory (1963) operationalized the self-concept, the WIS added the life-space dimension: the recognition that people occupy multiple roles simultaneously and that careers are shaped by the interaction of these roles . Super's chapter 'Values: Their Nature, Assessment, and Practical Use' places values within the broader schema of personality .

The WIS produced two major instruments: the Values Scale and the Role Salience Inventory (RSI) . The Values Scale measures the importance individuals attach to various values such as achievement, altruism, autonomy, and economic security. The RSI assesses the relative salience of the five life roles. The publisher notes that the book contains 'a wealth of information and an assortment of instruments valuable for career counseling and human resources development in business, industry, and government agencies' . These instruments have been used in career assessment, vocational counseling, personnel selection, and program evaluation across many countries.

The book was published by Jossey-Bass in 1995, after Super's death in June 1994 . Super served as international coordinator of the WIS, based at the University of Florida, while also professor emeritus at Teachers College, Columbia University . Branimir Šverko, professor of psychology at the University of Zagreb, co-edited the volume with assistance from Charles M. Super . The 1995 publication thus represents the posthumous culmination of Super's career-long research program, with his collaborators completing the synthesis he had initiated.

The WIS addressed this challenge by developing a cross-national measure that was indigenous to each participating country—meaning each national team adapted the instruments to their own linguistic and cultural context rather than translating a single master version . This approach allowed researchers to identify both universal patterns and culturally specific variations. The book's final section presents macroanalyses and microanalyses of cross-national data, including 'The Structure and Hierarchy of Values Viewed Cross-Nationally' by Šverko and 'Values in a Cross-Cultural Perspective' by Trentini and Muzio .