Technical appendix for ‘Money isn’t everything for these young adults when choosing their careers’

Our focus groups consisted of a total of 18 participants, generally within the rule of thumb for qualitative study sizes.

Focus groups were all conducted virtually using Zoom. We recorded conversations with participants’ permission, which produced a transcription of our conversations used for analysis.

We asked our participants the following questions, which were vetted internally with other qualitative researchers:

1. What are or were you looking for in your career and/or higher education journey after high school? In other words, what are or were your motivatingfactors in deciding what you were going to do next?
2. What challenges, if any, do you experience day to day in your current path(school, work or both)? If you are facing challenges, do you think it willbe worth it in the long run? Why or why not? 
3. Each generation has its stereotype. For example, Millennials were thought to be lazy and entitled. What do you think your generation's stereotype is, especially when applied to school or work? What is unique about the challenges your generation is facing when it comes to school and work, and what support do you need to overcome these challenges?

Over four focus groups we reached saturation. We did a thematic analysis of data gathered from these focus groups using inductive coding. Coding was performed manually.

Findings are not generalizable to all young adults. Our participants came from a convenience sample through preexisting relationships with workforce development programs, which could introduce bias in the sample. In some cases, participants knew each other, while in other cases, they did not. This could have resulted in groupthink, which we did our best to account for in the analysis.

Trends that arose in the conversation but did not reach full saturation include the following:

• Participants’ motivation to break the cycle of poverty within their families.
• Challenges such as time management, transportation and dealing with rejection in the labor market.
• Being a child of immigrants can be both a motivating factor to pursue certain pathways and simultaneously a challenge to go down that path.

Future research could explore these ideas further to better understand how they influence decision making.