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The former procedurę was connected with many repetitions of studies of randomly matched persons from their late childhood to late adolescence (our studies lasted 11 years). Thanks to idiographic approach these studies madę it possible to:

•    show particular subjective meanings of situations of making educational decisions on education and on futurę careers and circumstances which were connected with them, i.e. which madę it easier to reconstruct the decision-making situation (motivation, decision strategy, subjective feelings during decision-making, visualisation of the futurę of the decision-maker and the influence of their past experiences),

•    revealing of the cause-and-efTect relationships between yariables which are significant for projecting educational and professional futurę of a particular person,

•    making descriptive generalisations conceming a spccific case and a number of similar cases (casuistic typologies).

The qualitative materiał collected by the author madę it possible to present several case studies constituting an exemplification of the longitudinal model of studies. It also became a contribution to the descriptive distinction of strategies of projecting educational and professional futurę applied by young people (they are situated within the perspectivist and presentist strategies described in literaturę of the subject).

The following strategies could be found in amongst them: condensation strategy (“narrowing down of the field of choices⁴⁴), additive strategy (“doing puzzles⁴⁴), stochastic strategy (“random choices⁴⁴ or “relying on others“), actualistic strategies in two variants: the optimistic one - strategy of temporisation (“something will tum up eventually“, or “I shall worry about it when it comes“) and the pessimistic - passive strategy (“I can see no prospects for myself⁴), overcautious strategy (“A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush“).

In tum, ąuestionnaire studies conducted on large groups of pupils, who faced the transition status between difTerent types of schools (form eight - before starting leaming at secondary schools of different types, and last classes of grammar school or other secondary schools and vocational schools - before starting tertiary education or taking a job) madę it possible to look for answers to the following ąuestions:

•    about profiling of paths of education and career at the stage of early and late adolescence (characterisation of choices madę and their objective motivation, i.e. What did the young people choose and why?)

•    the objective context of educational and career choices (educational aspirations and expectations of young people - the context of decisions on education, aims and values respected in the sphere of professional life - axiological orientations in the context of the projected professional path).

•    generał evaluation of the state of advancement of projecting the futurę and of its style (of the whole of characteristic features, i.e. of how young people planned their individual career path?),

•    Characterisation of the decision-making situation connected with projecting the futurę.

The above mentioned transverse studies revealed, among other things, the forma-tion on the educational thresholds of three different groups of adolescents (a statistical method of cluster analysis was applied, taking into consideration a combination of four variables: the time focus of the youth, the maturity of their motives, the naturę of the scope of their educational and professional opportunities and the extent of the scope of opportunities). Amongst them were adolescents:

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