This article examines the existing relations between the social background, the cognitive skills, the sense of schooling experience, the relation to learning and the professional project in the construction of the meaning of their course choice for French boys living in working-class families and guided to vocational studies. It presents the results of an extensive study (by questionnaire) realised in France, in eight schools of the Midi-Pyrénées region. In each school, all the students pursuing a V-level (vocational) diploma in catering, building and car industries were selected. The multivariate analysis reveals four profiles which show the diversity in the forms of compliance to the course choice and the way this compliance is supported by identitarian dynamics of very different personalisation issues. The results show the necessity to renew the models which, in the field of psychology, head towards explaining the sense of course choice to vocational studies by a process of rationalisation consisting in validating imposed course choice decision and living conditions. It is thus necessary to take more into consideration the diversity of living conditions and of training contexts that vocational students face to understand how they manage to themselves from stigmatising verdicts. © 2016, Instituto Superior de Psicologia Aplicada, Lisboa, Portugal and Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.
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