The concept of calling is relevant to many people’s working lives. Most extant research examines perceiving and living a calling, but search for a calling is comparatively understudied. We addressed this by examining profiles of searching for and presence of a calling using latent profile analysis (LPA) across student and employed adult samples. We conducted two studies ( N = 1,251). Study 1 recruited participants from a U.S. university, and Study 2 drew a subsample of employed adults from the nationally representative Portraits of American Life Study. Profiles were compared across criterion variables including living a calling, academic/job satisfaction, purpose/meaning in life, hope, and faith at work. Among each sample, four profiles emerged: unresolved searchers (low presence, high search) , called satisficers (high presence, low search), called explorers (high presence, high search), and unconcerned with calling (low presence, low search). For students, called explorers showed greater work-related and overall well-being. For employed adults, called satisficers appeared most favorable. This research revealed arrangements of how people engage with their sense of calling and identified how the nature of seeking a calling and its associations may differ between students and employed adults.
Marsh et al. (Fri,) studied this question.