Journal of Vocational Behavior 16, 282-298 (1980) A Life-Span, Life-Space Approach to Career Development DONALD E. SUPER A career is defined as the combination and sequence of roles played by a person during the course of a lifetime. These roles include those of child, pupil or student, leisurite, citizen, worker, spouse, homemaker, parent, and pensioner, positions with associated expectations that are occupied at some time by most people, and other less common roles such as those of criminal, reformer, and lover. A Life-Career Rainbow is presented as a means of helping conceptualize mul- tidimensional careers, the temporal involvement in, and the emotional commit- ment to, each role. Self-actualization in various roles, role conflicts, and the determinants of role selection and of role performance are discussed. The use of the Rainbow in career education and in counseling is briefly considered. A paper with a title such as this might be expected to be one of two sorts of articles: seeking either to formulate a theory of career development from which hypotheses might be derived and tested, or merely attempting to describe what careers are and how they develop. Those who have proposed theories have, almost always, dealt with occupational choice rather than with career development: Bordin, Nachmann, and Segal (1963), Holland (1973), and Roe (1957) are outstanding examples. The first and last have not been supported by the research they stimulated, and Holland’s hypotheses have been tested largely by the use of preferences to predict preferences and choices of courses rather than sequences of occupational positions. Writers who have focussed on career develop- ment, i.e., upon the emergence of sequences of choices throughout the whole or a part of the life span, have of necessity been limited by the scope of their task and by the variety of variables needing to be consid- ered to simple descriptions: Blau, Gustad, Jessor, Parnes, and Wilcock (1956), Ginzberg, Ginsburg, Axelrad, and Herma (1951), and Super, The contributions of A. D. Crowley, Jennifer Kidd, Bill Law, A. G. Watts, and other participants in the NICEC Career Development Research Seminar, are gratefully acknowl- edged. Requests for reprints should be sent to Donald E. Super, Research and Development Unit, National Institute for Careers Education and Counselling. Bateman Street, Cambridge CB2 ILZ, England. 282 OOOl-8791/80/030282-17$02.00/O Copyright @ 1980 by Academic Press. Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved