Given the additional psychological energy that LGB adolescents may need to devote to negotiating a marginalized sexual identity, it is important to examine how development in this realm of identity may influence other areas of their lives.
Of the life span models of career development, Super's (1957, 1980, 1990) developmental perspective of vocational identity pays particular attention to how psychological energy is focused on career issues during adolescence.
Although the bottleneck hypothesis considers the amount of internal psychological energy devoted to different developmental tasks, it neglects the potentially important influence of environmental context, which has been demonstrated to be an important factor in career development (Savickas, 2005; Super, 1957).
Furthermore, social support was expected to contribute unique and shared variance in career maturity and vocational indecision along with and beyond the variance accounted for by indicators of psychological energy invested in sexual identity development.
The bottleneck hypothesis is based on the assumption of the availability of limited psychological energy. Thus, three variables that were indicators of more versus less psychological energy being used on sexual identity development tasks were measured: identity confusion, internalized homonegativity, and perceptions of sexual identity development as a difficult process.
Conversely, it is possible that the reverse may also be true: LGB adolescents who have low levels of inner sexual identity conflict may have higher levels of career maturity and lower levels of vocational indecision, showing that more psychological energy is devoted to career development when conflict regarding sexual identity is at a lower level.
