Co-creating career aspirations in LSES youth LSES: Lower Socio-Economic Status (India)

For a majority of Lower Social Economic Status (LSES) youth in the Indian subcontinent, lack of positive role models and absence of career aspirations can be traced to the issue of “cultural capital” defined by Bourdieu (1977, 1986) who wrote “Cultural capital may be defined as forms of knowledge, skills, education, and advantages that a person has, which give them a higher status in society. Parents provide their children with cultural capital by transmitting the attitudes and knowledge needed to succeed in the current educational system”. Family background is crucial to the patterning of student’s achievement (Alexander & Entwise, 1987) and ample evidence exists to show that Socio-Economic Status (SES) affects family stability, including parenting practices and resulting developmental outcomes for children (Trickett, et al., 1991). As per the theory of Positive Youth Development (PYD) a hopeful future marked by positive contributions to self, family, community, and civil society is more likely if young people have mutually beneficial relations with people and institutions of their social world (Lerner, et al, 2005). With the objective of identifying reasons for absence of / low career aspirations among LSES youth two preliminary exploratory focus groups were conducted in Bangalore (India) in 2012