Review Of Missionary Kid Career Development: A Consensual Qualitative Research

Lynette H. Bikos, Professor of Clinical Psychology at Seattle Pacific University , and her colleagues Deanna Haney, Richard W. Edwards, Mark A. North, Meg Quint, Jillian McLellan and Diana L. Ecker in their article "Missionary Kid Career Development: A Consensual Qualitative Research Investigation Through a Social Cognitive Lens" (2014), argue that missionary kids have to overcome issues related to career planning. They support this claim by first interviewing 11 repatriated MKs using consensual qualitative research investigation methods (p. 159-160), then after analyzing the common themes, they indicated that most MKs do not know what careers they want to pursue (p. 163-169), and finally, that faith often found its way into the answers despite

had to say, like that missionary kids choose being a missionary as their career choice because it is all they know (Bikos et al., p. 164). All the kids in the missionary community wanted to be missionaries, nobody wanted to be a firefighter or police officer like normal kids did. Bikos et al. asserts that this could be because very little career exploration is being done by these MKs (p. 165). I agree, because of the isolation of the missionary community there was almost no contact with other careers. Unlike the kids in the study, and normal MKs in general, I left the mission field before high school; thus, I was able to explore career paths. Additionally, one other thing that I expected to differ in compared to the average MK is my faith; specifically that I am an atheist and most MKs are still Christian. The research of Bikos et al. backed up my prediction, but not to a degree I expected, 7 out of the 11 MKs identified as Christian (p. 162), this majority was not the neigh unanimity that I expected. Interestingly enough, they only report 5 out of the 11 MKs as saying that they are seeking God’s direction (p. 165), not at all what I was expecting. In my paper I will use this paper to explain how my godless thoughts may not be as unusual in MKs as I thought it would