Within the Swiss National Center of Competence in Research LIVES, vulnerabilities and resources can be conceived at multiple levels. Here we bring together researchers interested to track down various forms and sources of these two concepts in the domains of career development and work. This symposium will showcase a collection of newly developed instruments investigating the multiple levels at which vulnerabilities and resources can be experienced and respectively garnered, namely within individuals, in their interpersonal relationships or the broader normative context.

Starting within individuals in career development, Rochat and Rossier explore the validity of the career decision-making difficulties scale and its relationship with various forms of self-esteem. Sgaramella and colleagues then identify future orientation and resilience as relevant resources for individuals’ career and life paths. The next two talks then proceed with vulnerabilities and resources in individuals’ interpersonal and normative context. Introducing humor at work, Hofmann and Ruch validate a short instrument of dispositions toward ridicule and laughter and present their relations with work related outcomes. Finally, Bollmann, and Mena examine people endorsement of the free market system as an institution permeating society and its implications for the self and decision-making at work.

Indecision may be understood as a normative part of the developmental process if not —to a certain extent—an adaptive attitude toward the career choice. However, encountering severe career decision-making difficulties can also threaten career paths. This study presents the validation of the French-language version of the Career Decision-Making Difficulties Questionnaire (CDDQ) among 1,750 French-speaking adolescents and young adults. The structure of the CDDQ-French form was verified through confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), and multigroup CFA were used to test the measurement equivalence across a general sample and a clinical sample. Relationship with the short form of the Career Decision-Making Self-Efficacy Scale (CDMES-SF) and the Self-Esteem Scale (SES) were also explored. Implications of these findings for the assessment and support of vulnerabilities associated with career choice are discussed. 

The complex times that people are currently living in, and challenges they frequently face, raise new questions and draw the attention to dimensions such as future orientation, resilience  (Soresi et al., 2015), and to their possible role in Life Design (Nota et al., 2014; Savickas, et al., 2009).
A further, more compelling, challenge comes from the increasingly larger number of marginalized and vulnerable individuals (from unemployed to people with disabilities, addiction or psychopathological problems) who experience difficulties and add relevant questions about determinants and resources available to them for a successful Life Designing (Sgaramella et al., 2015). In order to face these challenges (besides career adaptability) additional quantitative and qualitative measures have been recently introduced in research conducted in the LARIOS laboratory, such as Design My Future, Vision about the future (Soresi et al., 2012 ab) and  My Future Interview (Sgaramella et al., 2014). After examining their psychometric properties, patterns of association with other relevant resources in life designing have been analyzed.
Results from large groups of young and adults, and particularly those coming from individuals experiencing vulnerabilities, support the relevance of these dimensions in Life Design studies. Their usefulness in counseling, and more specifically in career counseling, is also underscored.

Three dispositions towards ridicule and laughter have been put forward and investigated: Gelotophobia (the fear of being laughed at), gelotophilia (the joy of being laughed at), and katagelasticism (the joy of laughing at others). Within the NCCR LIVES project, gelotophobia has been postulated to be a potential vulnerability in the work place context, where the misperception of feeling laughed at and being bullied can have detrimental effects on work stress and work satisfaction. For an economic, large-scale assessment of the three dispositions, we first developed and validated a short form (PhoPhiKat-9) of the standard self-report instrument (PhoPhiKat-45) in two independent samples. Second, the PhoPhiKat-9 was validated in a representative sample of Swiss employees in a third sample, relating gelotophobia to relevant behaviors and perceptions at the work place. Results and implications are discussed. 

We conceptualize the belief in a free market system (BFM) as people endorsement of basic assumptions about the economy. The free market system is an institution permeating western societies in which individuals freely pursue their interests, organizations maximize their profits, State doesn’t intervene, and competition rules market exchanges. In our sense-making-intuitionist framework, the belief is an amoral cognition people endorse to satisfy fundamental motives and which make them go about their life, unaware of the moral stakes of their choices. In 5 studies involving samples of executives, students and the general population (N(total) = 1374), we develop and validate a measure of BFM and then longitudinally and cross-sectionally test its predictive power on relevant outcomes for individuals and society. BFM is a one dimensional, reliable concept, and is positively associated to social dominance and meritocracy, negatively related to need-based allocations and, crucially, unrelated to moral identity. It might serve people satisfaction with their life but increases the likelihood of amoral decisions-making at work. As such, it constitutes simultaneously a resource and a vulnerability depending on the context in which it is applied.