Staying Motivated: The Study Protocol for a Life-Course Analysis of the Career Paths of Canadian Public Servants

Abstract

All Canadians benefit from a high quality of public service delivery, which is directly related to the motivation of public servants. A top priority for governments is to attract and retain a public sector workforce that is motivated and enthusiastic to serve the public good. The Public Service Motivation (PSM) theory offers a framework for the analysis of motivations of public servants. Knowledge is lacking on how motivations of public servants change over time and are shaped by the life-course dynamics of identities, roles, inequalities, and experiences. Our goal is to chronicle the motivations of individuals over a life course, specifically from the onset of their career in the public service to their current career stage. We will contribute to PSM theory by combining it with the Life Course Theory (LCT). This will allow for the analysis of change in PSM over time and in relation to other life events. We aim to further our understanding of determinants of motivation of public servants by unveiling the dynamic, gendered, and diverse nature of PSM, and its interconnections with professional and personal lives. Our approach is qualitative. We will interview 100 alumni of graduate public administration programs in four Canadian institutions with reference to their graduate program admissions letter as a point of departure. During reflexive interviews, participants will co-analyse their admissions letters, where our role will be to guide them along the PSM framework. We will hear from study participants how their motivations changed since those expressed in their admissions letter, to what extent motivations over time were influenced by the events in their professional and personal lives, their identities, and roles in the workplace and in society, and their personal characteristics. Interview transcripts will be analysed using reflexive thematic analysis and interpreted jointly with the study participants.

Keywords

public service motivation public service career paths life course analysis gender and public service reflexive thematic analysis

Introduction

What motivates public servants to do their jobs? Is it money, status, or the opportunity to help others? The theory of Public Service Motivation (PSM) is core to public administration scholarship and captures potential employment related motives of public servants. PSM has been described as “… the drive … to take social responsibility, supress selfishness, and benefit society” (Wang et al., 2020, p. 3).

Approximately 25% of the Canadian workforce is employed in the public sector (Statistics Canada, retrieved Sep 20, 2021). Governments at all three levels, Crown corporations, and the MUSH (municipalities, universities, schools, hospitals) sector provide services for citizens, implement programs, enforce policies and frameworks and are generally instrumental in creating the Canada that ranks first in the Best Countries of the World Report 2021 (US News, 2021).

An engaged and motivated public sector workforce enhances the quality of public service delivery (Jarvis, 2016), as illustrated in Figure 1. While the latest Canadian Public Service Employee Survey indicates that the majority of employees are satisfied with their jobs (Government of Canada, 2021), the sources and types of satisfaction can be an important influence on how well satisfaction translates into exceptional service. Employee satisfaction in the public sector is directly related to motivation (Stefurak et al., 2020; Taylor, 2007), and the PSM literature highlights the importance of normative and affective motives among public servant as the most beneficial to society (Bozeman & Su, 2015).

Figure 1.

A motivated government workforce delivers higher quality services. (https://www.susanmacleod.ca/).

A top priority of all governments is to attract and retain a public sector workforce that is motivated and enthusiastic to do good for society and remains engaged in their career, while minimizing employee disengagement, burnout, absenteeism, and turnover (Dutil & Migone, 2021). It is critical that we understand how individual characteristics, such as gender (DeRiviere et al., 2021), institutional characteristics, such as employer practices, and life course events, including work experiences, shape motivations over time. This knowledge will arm the public sector as an employer with the ability to appropriately support its workforce.

Research Goal and Objectives

Our goal is to chronicle the motivations of individuals over a life course, specifically from the onset of their public service career to their current career stage, using a novel combination of Public Service Motivation (PSM) and Life Course Theory (LCT).

Objective 1: To develop a new dynamic theoretical framework that connects the PSM and LCT theories.

Objective 2: To describe the changes to PSM experienced by Canadian public servants over the course of their career, including the interactions with personal life course transitions and turning points.

Objective 3: To unveil the dynamic, gendered, and diverse nature of the interconnections between PSM and the professional and personal life course.

Objective 4: To construe the implications on the public sector human resource policies.

Theoretical Framework

Our theoretical framework is based on the integration of two theories: (i) Public Service Motivation (PSM) Theory and (ii) Life Course Theory (LCT). To date, with few exceptions (e.g. Miller-Mor-Attias & Vigoda-Gadot, 2021; Andrews, 2021) PSM has been studied in a static fashion; motivations are captured in a snapshot or a particular moment. Insufficient attention is paid to changes in motivations over the course of individuals’ lives, and the interplay with the life-course dynamics of identities, roles, inequalities, and experiences. To the best of our knowledge, PSM has not been studied from a life course perspective to date, and our work will pioneer this approach. In this section, we first summarize the most relevant literature from the PSM and LCT theories that shaped our theoretical framework. Next, we describe the new proposed theoretical framework (objective 1 is to refine the initial version).

Public Service Motivation – Literature

Public service motivation (PSM) theory identifies the drivers behind individuals’ choices to work in public service careers, primarily the public sector. In our previous qualitative pilot study (DeRiviere et al., 2021), we used the PSM framework in Table 1 based on the PSM tradition advanced by Perry and Wise (1990) and refined over the past three decades (Perry & Wise, 1990; Perry & Hondeghem, 2008; Perry et al., 2010). PSM is organized into three categories: (i) rational motivations such as an attraction to public policy making to reinforce one’s anticipated contributions to public service; (ii) normative motivations such as a commitment to civic duty and the public interest, driven by cultural or societal mores; and (iii) affective motivations based on compassion in response to social situations. We had added Henstra and McGowan’s (2016) division of rewards into intrinsic and extrinsic (Henstra & McGowan, 2016). The resultant framework is shown below.

Table 1.

Public Service Motivation – Conceptual Framework used in Pilot Study.

		Motivations
		Rational Self-interest	Normative Sense of Duty	Affective Altruistic interest in social causes
REWARDS	Extrinsic	Compensation and benefits; career opportunities; work arrangements	Performance recognition: conforming to values (e.g., mentoring from role model)	Recognition in the community or society; moral heroism
REWARDS	Intrinsic	Contribution to policy, regulation, or programming. Feeling of self-importance	Contribution to public interest, loyalty and duty to the government. Doing the right thing	Conviction or passion about the importance of serving others in the community

Empirical research on PSM has seen rapid growth over the last three decades (Perry et al., 2010; Ritz et al., 2016; Korac et al., 2019), mostly in the context of public institutions and public sector employment. Some studies have focused on motivations of graduate students pursuing public sector-related degrees (Chetkowich, 2003; Vanderbeele, 2008; Carpenter et al., 2012; Lee & Choi, 2016; Van Der Wal & Oosterbaan, 2013), a small subset of which have studied graduate programs in Canada (DeRiviere et al., 2021; Henstra & McGowan, 2016; Ng & Gossett, 2013).

Canadian PSM research is underdeveloped despite the size of the Canadian public sector, which is consistent with previous findings regarding the scholarly impact of Canadian public administration research in general (Charbonneau et al., 2018). An ongoing systematic search of the literature on public service motivation, its dimensions, its antecedents and its employment related outcomes revealed 1091 titles of studies of public service motivation, of which only 15 were specific to the Canadian context (Atkinson et al., 2014; Barney & Elias, 2010; Braun & Clarke, 2020; Bromberg & Charbonneau, 2020; Brown & White, 2021; Bullock et al., 2015; DeRiviere et al., 2021; Hensta & McGowan, 1996; Honig, 2021; Houston, 2011; Kernaghan, 2011; Lewis & Ng, 2013; Ng et al., 2016; Ng & Gossett, 2013a, 2013b; Taylor & Taylor, 2011; Taylor & Westover, 2011; Van de Walle et al., 2015). To date, we searched three databases (Scopus, PAIS, and ProQuest) using broad searches: [“public service” OR “public sector” OR “PSM”] AND [“motivation” OR “ethos”] in title, abstract, and keywords AND “public service motivation” in all fields, limited to English language studies, later limiting to Canadian studies. We also searched Canadian Public Administration manually in both English and French.

The functional understanding and definition of PSM remains contested. In a systematic review of PSM literature, Bozeman and Su (2015) highlight a lack of consensus whether PSM is tied to an organization or is it an institution-independent set of individuals’ characteristics (Bozeman & Su, 2015). Some understand PSM to spring from the context of employment in a public sector organization (Perry & Wise, 1990; Houston & Cartwright, 2007), while others understand PSM to exist as a part of human nature, nurtured within the employment contexts (Taylor, 2007; Vanderbeele, 2008; Liu et al., 2008). O’Leary (2019) even argues that PSM should be viewed as one in the family of rational choice theories, rather than a unique framework (O’Leary, 2019). Schott et al. (2019) fully disentangle the notion of PSM from the organization and position it as set of general characteristics (Schott et al., 2019). Thompson and Christensen (2018) position PSM as organization-independent in contrast to a ‘calling’ to the public sector (Thompson & Christiansen, 2018). Wang et al. (2020) describe PSM as “… a mix of motives that drive an individual – regardless of being employed in the public sector or not – to take social responsibility, supress selfishness, and benefit society” (Wang et al., 2020, p.3). Consistently with recent literature, we adopt the organization-independent definition used by Taylor (2007), namely that: “PSM is a cluster of motives, values, and attitudes on serving the public interest” (Taylor, 2007, p.67). Additionally, we propose that PSM is dynamic and dependent on career and life events.

Life Course Theory and Career - Literature

Life Course Theory is “… a theoretical orientation that guides research on human lives within context” (Elder et al., 2003). The context consists of social, historical, biological, economic events and pathways during a person’s lifetime (Elder et al., 2003; Gomes & Deuling, 2019; Latz & Rediger, 2014). Pathways, composed of a series of roles that people take on, are shaped by context, in addition to individual circumstance, disposition, preferences (Calderone et al., 2020). LCT researchers focus on life as a whole, in other words, each period of experiences should be regarded as connected to the past and future (Hutchison, 2019). “No period of life can be understood in isolation from people’s prior experiences, as well as their aspirations for the future” (Elder et al., 2003, p.xi).

Life Course scholars use the following five core concepts (Elder et al., 2003; Hutchison, 2019):

• Cohorts are groups of people born in the same time period.

• Trajectories are sequences of roles and experiences.

• Transitions are changes in state or role, in a trajectory.

• Durations are times between transitions, in a trajectory.

• Turning points are substantial subjective or objective changes in direction of life/trajectories, including those involving work issues (e.g., job change or job insecurity). Many turning points may be recognizable only in retrospect.

Life Course Theory is based on the following four principles (Elder et al., 2003; Calderone et al., 2020):

• Principle of agency – individuals have the capacity to make choices and take actions within the opportunities and constraints of history and context.

• Principle of time and place – life course embedded in and shaped by the external context.

• Principle of timing – same events can have different effects depending on when they occur in life course (antecedents and consequences of life transitions and events).

• Principle of linked lives – interdependency, relational interconnectedness, interpersonal relationships.

LCT has been applied to the investigation of employment career paths (literature focused on criminal careers is omitted here), but we found no studies that employed LCT to examine PSM, public service careers, or the dynamics of career motivations in any sector. LCT research into career or educational paths often applies a gendered lens; career decisions are regarded as intertwined with life decisions, and we know that women experience the personal life-career negotiation differently from men (Calderone et al., 2020; Hutchinson, 2019; Hartzell & Dixon, 2019; McDonald, 2018). In general, this literature often considers the development of career and the building of personal life and family to happen in tandem, despite elsewhere being considered and researched as two distinct occurrences (Hartzell and Dixon, 2019).

LCT or a life course perspective has been adopted to the study of educational paths and the academic trajectory (Schimpf et al., 2015), career paths and work-life balance of college faculty members (Latz & Rediger, 2014; Sabharwal, 2013), views of women on taking leadership roles (Calderone et al., 2020), underrepresentation of women in sports leadership (Hartzell & Dixon, 2019), and the study of interactions between employers, youth and their parents (Gomes & Deuling, 2019).

McDonald (2018) applied the LCT framework to the study of expectations of university students in Australia in relation to flexible careers (McDonald, 2018). This approach was atypical, Hutchison (2019) states that “trajectories are best understood in the rear-view mirror” (Hutchinson, 2019, p. 354) given that many transitions and particularly turning points cannot be anticipated. Their findings showed differences between women and men in how they anticipate adapting careers to personal lives, and in their expectations of labour markets, home ownership, and access to flexible work (Hutchinson, 2019). Huang et al. (2007) discussed career aspirations in the context of LCT and career development, specifically flagging that aspirations and vocational choices can change over time and in the context of life course transitions and turning points (Huang et al., 2007). Latz and Rediger (2014) found that approaches to work-life balance among college faculty varied depending on position in life course (Latz & Rediger, 2014). Tomlison et al. (2018) used LCT to study flexible careers, emphasizing the importance of considering how institutional and organizational contexts, as shaped by various actors, influenced individuals’ career decisions alongside their personal characteristics (Tomlison et al., 2018). Hartzell and Dixon (2019) discussed the integration of LCT with career trajectory models as a comprehensive framework for the study of change in women’s reasons and perspectives on leadership in sports, and the possibility that these are impacted differently, sometimes by the same factors at different points in women’s lives (Hatzell & Dixon, 2019).

Public Service Motivation over the Life Course – New (initial) theoretical framework

A critical gap in PSM theory is its static nature, the absence of trajectories and interconnections with life events. Current PSM theory allows for motivations to be shaped by institutions, but the element of time is not explicit. We propose that PSM is dependent on the general life course of an individual, and that life course events shape PSM over time. We propose that the application of LCT to the study of PSM can fill important gaps in the PSM framework. As described, there is ongoing discussion in the PSM literature about the institution-dependence or independence of PSM. With the LCT lens, we propose that PSM is life-course-dependent, and that public service careers and motivations are shaped by personal dispositions and contextual factors, including but not limited to institutions. Furthermore, we propose that the path of PSM over the life course, the dependence of PSM on contextual factors, and the interdependencies with others are experienced differently women, men, and non-binary individuals. Life course analysis is necessarily gendered, given that how femininities, masculinities, and non-binary experiences shape lives differently (Acker, 2012; Calderone et al., 2020; DeRiviere et al., 2021).

Methods

Research Design

We apply a phenomenological design to explore changes in motivations experienced during the career paths of alumni of five Master of Public Administration (MPA) programs across Canada. The point of departure will be each participant’s graduate admissions letter. This will build on our recent pilot study (DeRiviere et al., 2021) in which we analyzed the motivations of applicants to two MPA programs using their graduate admissions letters. A phenomenological study focuses on exploring the understandings and sense-makings of participants as they experience a specific phenomenon (Eller et al., 2018; Van Thiel, 2014). This is appropriate for our study, in which the phenomenon is the gendered experience of public service motivation over the course of a career that was launched by an MPA degree.

We bring an innovation in methods used to study PSM by incorporating collaborative co-creation and reflexive elements that involve participants as researchers . We import this approach from the health research field, where increasingly patients and/or the public are involved in research (Bhati et al., 2020; Roche et al., 2020). The approach is consistent with feminist methodologies that question the hierarchical division between the investigator and the investigated (Sprague & Kobrynowicz, 2006) and other forms of participatory research. Benefits of this approach include a broadening of perspectives, added dimensions to identified themes, and an analysis grounded in user experience that allows for increased credibility, relevance, and checking of validity of interpretations and conclusions (Brett et al., 2014; Hemming et al., 2021). Additionally, our participants may be in public service roles that shape human resource policies, in other words, some could be the knowledge users of our work.

Data Collection – Reflexive Qualitative Interviews

Recruitment and sample size – Recruitment will take place using each School’s alumni contacts, following a similar process as in our pilot study (DeRiviere et al., 2021).

The target sample size is 25 participants per institution for a total sample of n = 100. The a priori determination of sample sizes in qualitative research is challenging, and we will be carefully balance budgetary considerations with saturation requirements. If the n = 100 does not appear to have saturated the sample requirements, we will continue recruitment until saturation. Depending on the availability of admissions letters and response rate, we will work toward constructing diverse samples from each institution, paying attention to inclusion of years since graduation, genders (to the extent these are known), and ethnic backgrounds (to the extent these are known).

Interviews will be distributed across researchers, as shown in Figure 2 (ENAP and Waterloo have one researcher). Dalhousie may take more ENAP-alumni interviews depending on language needs. To reduce bias, no interviewer will interview alumni from their own institution, to ensure that participants feel comfortable to speak freely about their experiences with the MPA program as a part of their life course. Interviews will take place virtually or in person, depending on the convenience of participants and public health guidelines.

Figure 2.

Allocation of sub-samples to researchers.

Handling of data – Coordination of project logistics will include recruitment, curation of the existing data by digitizing past applications to our programs, preparation of interview documents, scheduling of interviews, and management the transcription services and data uploads to a qualitative analysis software. Identities of consenting participants will become known to the researchers given the qualitative and engaged nature of the research. Identities will be kept confidential and known only to members of the research team and the Research Coordinator.

Data collection method - We will use a participant’s past description of their motivations to enter an MPA program, their admissions letter, as an artifact, with the purpose of focusing the discussion on the experienced change in PSM over their life course. The written record of participants’ past motivations that can be collected systematically for all participants is relatively unique opportunity in interview-based research. Each interview will have two parts. First, participants will reflect on the written records of their own past motivations, in other words their graduate admissions letters. Second, participants will speak to the dynamic developments in their career motivations and interconnections to the course of their lives. An interview guide is available in Appendix 1.

In the first part of the interview the following sequence is proposed: (i) participants reflect on their letter and interpret their own motivations and ambitions at the time of application absent a theoretical framework; (ii) we jointly examine how their letter speaks to the elements of the PSM analytical framework; (iii) participants interpret and reflect on their PSM at the time of application. This third step is simultaneously data collection and co-analysis (see next section).

Admissions letters have been used as research data (Chetkovich, 2003; DeRiviere et al., 2021; Elam et al., 2015) and suffer from the general limitations of administrative records as data (Acquadro et al., 2019; Atherley & Hickman, 2014; Cole et al., 2020; Groves & Schoeffel, 2018; Megerdoomian et al., 2019). Limitations, such as an incompleteness of information for research purposes, are mitigated through the co-analysis approach and direct the input from those about whom administrative records were kept.

In the second part of the interview, participants will be asked to describe transitions and turning points in their careers and personal lives and reflect on how these may have influenced their PSM. For example, have they shifted from being rationally to being normatively motivated, and how do they explain this shift. The reflexivity in this step is on the part of the participants. We will prompt them to speak to the interconnectedness between career and personal lives, and focus on description of agency, timing, time and place, and influences of interpersonal relationships. We aim to explore individuals’ subjective experiences of their public service motivation and their sense-making of the changes in PSM over the course of their career, as interconnected with their personal life, time, space, context, and other people. It is important to us how individuals’ perspectives on PSM are shaped by the broader historical, social, economic, and cultural context. We will identify and analyze explicit and implicit expressions of the influences of gender on the PSM over a life course experience.

Additionally, participants will be invited to participate in the piloting of a new analytical approach: interpretive reflexive co-analysis. The additional component (relative to other participants) is that we will evaluate this analytical approach with the those participants who choose to take part in the analytical step, their analytical commitment (time and intellectual investment) will be greater than otherwise, and we will hold a reflective meeting to discuss the approach. The last question of the interview asks, whether we may contact respondents for further participation in the next step of the study - analysis.

Analysis – Reflexive Thematic Co-Analysis

The reflexive co-analysis component of the analysis will occur simultaneously with the first part of the interview, during which participants co-analyse their own past admissions letters. The researcher’s role will be to relate the participant’s interpretation within the context of the PSM framework. Participants will have further opportunity to reflect on more aggregated interim results via a non-public website forum. The second part of the interview will be analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Data will be interpreted in collaboration with experienced former public servants who have qualitative research experience (Caron, Filbee). This differs from interpretive phenomenological analysis, which requires a more detailed and in-depth engagement with each participant’s account of their experience prior to cross-interview comparison and is appropriate for smaller sample sizes.

Thematic Analysis involves the “… searching across a data set […] to find repeated patterns of meaning” (Braun & Clarke, 2006, p.86). The approach to qualitative data analysis is not tied to a particular theoretical tradition and is well adaptable to our conceptual framework (Braun & Clarke, 2020). A Reflexive Thematic Analysis is sufficiently flexible to capture semantic (explicit) and latent (implicit) meanings (Braun & Clarke, 2006). In our study, the description of motivators or demotivators, for example, may be implicit and underlying. The reflexivity in this step is on the part of the researchers and lies in the development of themes from codes in an interpretive and deliberative fashion, where the researcher brings their experiences, skills and values to the process, and commits to reflection on how these bear on the coding process (Braun & Clarke, 2020). This is fitting given our research team’s close engagement with public administration education and practice.

Considering thematic analysis as a spectrum from strict reliability focused to fully interpretive (Braun & Clarke, 2021), our approach falls toward the middle. While we consider researcher reflexivity as a key feature of theme development, yet we do rely on an a priori initial analytical framework drawn from the literature (Table 1) and to be finalized during the analysis process (Gale et al., 2013). The Framework Approach to thematic analysis is appropriate for interdisciplinary team projects (Gale et al., 2013), nonetheless we remain open to inductive data-driven findings.

Our analytical process will follow six general phases, which are recursive or iterative, as outlined by Braun and Clarke (2006). This is not unlike other qualitative analytical processes (Eller et al., 2018; Gale et al., 2013, VanThiel, 2014): (i) familiarize oneself with the data; (ii) generate initial codes (in our case we start with the initial coding framework and expand); (iii) search for themes; (iv) review and map (initial) themes; (v) define, name, and map (final) themes; (vi) report on results (Braun & Clarke, 2006).

Interviews will be analysed in the same sub-sets of 25 by the researcher who conducted them and by a Research Assistant (RA) in their institution. The researcher/RA teams will discuss every interview and analysis, and discuss the themes drawn out of their sub-set. The full research team will discuss all interviews jointly and draw out themes from the full set of 100 interviews and interpreting. All coders will keep reflective memos in addition to standard analytic memos. At least two team meetings will be devoted to researcher reflection on how our own positionality, experiences, skills, values, and life-course came to bear on our interpretations of admission letters (first meeting), and our analysis of the interviews in general (second meeting).

Ethics

The research project has been reviewed and approved by the Dalhousie University Research Ethics Board, followed by approvals from the Research Ethics Boards at the University of Winnipeg, the University of Waterloo, Wilfrid Laurier University, and Ecole national d’administration publique (ENAP). The informed consent form including the detailed study description is available in Appendix 2. We are strongly committed to protecting the identities and the data of our research participants. The identities of participants will be known to our research team and to the Research Coordinator. The Research Coordinator will de-identify audio recordings and keep a separate log of names and participant ID codes. The log will also track relevant participant characteristics (university, gender, ethnicity (if known), year of graduation, order of government) that are available to us. All data files (text and audio) will be stored with the participant ID code. Other research assistants involved in analysis will know participant ID codes only and will not learn the names of participants.

Rigour

Assurance of rigour in qualitative research begins with a detailed planning, description, and documentation of methods (Roberts et al., 2019; Cypress, 2017). Detailed descriptions of methods are often omitted from articles reporting on study results due to word count limitations in journals. We consider the publication of the study protocol a key step in the assurance of rigour and the accountability of researchers to the research community. While grant proposals and ethics applications require that methods and processes be articulated in detail, these remain largely hidden from the public eye.

We are keenly mindful of potential bias and have built mitigation strategies into our research design. First, we work to reduce bias on the part of researchers and participants by ensuring that we interview former students from other programs (not our own programs). Second, we planned at least one meeting devoted to the reflection on our own biases and how these bear on the ongoing research.

Our study is framed by two well established theoretical approaches, often considered core to well-designed research, and is guided by a widely used qualitative research design. Nonetheless, our study combines approaches, for example the constructivism of a pure phenomenological study is diluted with the creation of an a priori analytical framework and relatively structured interview questions (Kahlke, 2014). Yet these are the very tools that improve rigour. Other important criteria for rigour and trustworthiness of qualitative research, proposed in the literature (White et al., 2012, Roberts et al., 2019; Fereday & Muir-Cochrane, 2006) and satisfied in our protocol as follows.

(i) Consistency in data collection, which we achieve through a pre-specified interview guide, a commitment for data collection to be done by core research team members, and constant communication between the research team, including bi-weekly debriefing during the interview phase of the study.

(ii) Consistency in data analysis and the development of a conceptual analytical framework, which we achieve with our framework as presented above, the training of research assistants, and constant communication between the research team, including bi-weekly (or more often if required) debriefing and discussions during the analytical phase. This encompasses the reflexivity of researchers.

(iii) Creation of a comprehensive audit trail, which we achieve through the record keeping related to each interview, including reflective and analytic memos, record keeping related to any deviation from the study protocol (e.g. interview questions may be modified following the first few interviews based on the interview experience), and a shared depository of all study documents and updates accessible to all research team members. The latter excludes confidential information, such as the identifies of respondents.

Further assurance of rigour is offered by the conduct and publication of a pilot study that allowed us to test and refine methods for the use of graduate admissions letters as data sources that describe motivations of young adults embarking on public service careers.

Conclusions

Our study has the potential to contribute to knowledge on PSM, the broader organizational behaviour and professional motivations literature, and to policy. The study of PSM has not previously been framed in life-course theory nor any other dynamic framework that allows for change over time. Our work will test the new theoretical framework, which may potentially be applicable to the study of other professions, for example health professions, and the paths of their public service motivations over the life-course. Lastly, the study has potential to directly influence graduate level academic programs in Canada, and indirectly influence policy. Graduate programming might respond to the experiences of public administration graduate students captured in this study, given that investigators are also educators in this field. Human resources policies might respond to the results of our study, given that our participants may be directly involved in their shaping. Our integrated knowledge mobilization through co-analysis and co-creation of knowledge increases the probability of turning new knowledge into practice.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental Material - Staying Motivated: The Study Protocol for a Life-Course Analysis of the Career Paths of Canadian Public Servants

Supplemental Material for Staying Motivated: The Study Protocol for a Life-Course Analysis of the Career Paths of Canadian Public Servants by Wiesława Dominika Wranik, Rosemary McGowan, Linda DeRiviere, Isabelle Caron, Joan Grace, Maude Boulet, and Katherine Sara Filbee in International Journal of Qualitative Methods

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Dr. Chantelle Falconer, Research Facilitator at the Faculty of Management, Dalhousie University, for her supportive and invaluable feedback offered during the SSHRC Insight Grant application stages. We would also like to thank the reviewers for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Insight Grant Spring 2021 competition for their useful comments and suggestions. Lastly, we would like to thank Susan MacLeod Studio (susanmacleod.ca) for the creation of the graphic presented in Figure 1.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Insight Grant award number 435-2022-1034. The study was reviewed and approved by Dalhousie’s Research Ethics Board (file number 2022-6203), the University of Winnipeg Human Ethics Research Board (file numer HE2022-6203), École nationale d'administration publique (file number CÉR - ÉNAP 2022 – 19), the University of Waterloo (file number 44377), and Wilfrid Laurier University (file number 8359).

ORCID iDs

Wiesława Dominika Wranik

Katherine Sara Filbee

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

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