SELF-SCHEMA AMONG JOB SEEKERS COMPARED TO THE EMPLOYED

This paper compares the sociocognitive organisation of self-schema among job-seekers and the employed. The participants were interviewed at local employment agencies or in enterprises. The approach used stems directly from the methodology adopted by Markus (1977) in a study on self-schema. The jobseekers had to carry out three tasks which required the manipulation of personality traits with positive and negative connotations : a self-descriptive task in which the time for decision-making was measured; an autobiographical task; and a recall task. The results show that : 1 / the job-seekers took more time than the subjects of the control group to judge self-descriptive positive traits, but took less time than the subjects of the control group to reject the negative traits; 2 / compared to the subjects of the control group, the job-seekers judged more self-descriptive negative traits than positive traits; 3 / the group of job-seekers recalled more negative than positive traits compared to the control group.