The Developmental Science of Adolescence

History Through Autobiography

Richard M. Lerner, Anne C. Petersen, Rainer K. Silbereisen, Jeanne Brooks-Gunn

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136673795
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The Developmental Science of Adolescence: History Through Autobiography is the most authoritative account of the leading developmental scientists from around the world. Written by the scholars who shaped the history they are recounting, each chapter is an engaging and personal account of the past, present, and future direction of the field. No other reference work has this degree of authenticity in presenting the best developmental science of adolescence.

The book includes a Foreword by Saths Cooper, President of the International Union of Psychological Science and autobiographical chapters by the following leading developmental scientists:

Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, Robert Wm. Blum, Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, B. Bradford Brown, Marlis Buchmann, John Bynner, John Coleman, Rand D. Conger, James E. Côté, William Damon, Sanford M. Dornbusch, Nancy Eisenberg, Glen H. Elder, Jr., David P. Farrington, Helmut Fend, Andrew J. Fuligni, Frank F. Furstenberg, Beatrix A. Hamburg, Stephen F. Hamilton, Karen Hein, Klaus Hurrelmann, Richard Jessor, Daniel P. Keating, Reed W. Larson, Richard M. Lerner, Iris F. Litt, David Magnusson, Rolf Oerter, Daniel Offer, Augusto Palmonari, Anne C. Petersen, Lea Pulkkinen, Jean E. Rhodes, Linda M. Richter, Hans-Dieter Rösler, Michael Rutter, Ritch C. Savin-Williams, John Schulenberg, Lonnie R. Sherrod, Rainer K. Silbereisen, Judith G. Smetana, Margaret Beale Spencer, Laurence Steinberg, Elizabeth J. Susman, Richard E. Tremblay, Suman Verma, and Bruna Zani.

1

Introduction

The History of the Developmental Science of Adolescence: The Role of Autobiographical Perspectives

RICHARD M. LERNER, ANNE C. PETERSEN, RAINER K. SILBEREISEN, AND JEANNE BROOKS-GUNN

The scientific study of adolescent development has burgeoned across the past four decades (Lerner & Steinberg, 2009). This growth has involved impressive increases in the quantity and quality of research devoted to this portion of the life span; marked increases in students seeking training in adolescent development; new investments by foundations and governmental bodies in addressing issues of health, education, employment, and civic engagement; and positive contributions to civil society of the 100 million individuals around the world who enter the adolescent decade each year (Lerner & Steinberg, 2009).

Scholarly resources such as handbooks and encyclopedias (Brown & Prinstein, 2011; Lerner & Steinberg, 2009) have grown to address the needs for knowledge about the development of adolescents (e.g., see Lerner & Steinberg, 2009, for a review). However, the availability of new scholarly resources does not meet all the needs of the scholars, practitioners, or policy-makers seeking to describe, explain, and optimize the course of the development of adolescents. Both present and subsequent cohorts of scholars who will carry the scientific study of adolescence into the future, and the practitioners and policy-makers who need to have evidence derived from such research to formulate appropriate actions to optimize the course of youth development worldwide, will need to understand more about the history of the field.

Such knowledge may provide both rich and detailed depictions of past, contemporary, and likely future scholarship pertinent to the adolescent developmental period. For instance, such knowledge may elucidate why the field is structured as it now is, explain why particular theories, methods, and substantive areas are of contemporary focal concern, and indicate what scientific issues have been resolved, what limitations of scholarship have been overcome, and what challenges exist for advancing science and its application. In short, the value of understanding the history of the developmental science of adolescence is that such knowledge provides lessons (“sample cases”) about how to best describe, explain, and optimize the life chances of the diverse young people of our world. To paraphrase philosopher George Santayana (1905), if we want to gain from our successes and learn from our failures, we need to understand our history.

However, to date, the history of the developmental science of adolescence has not been a major scholarly topic. A chapter by Muuss (1990), two chapters by Lerner and Steinberg (2004, 2009), two papers by Dubas, Miller, and Petersen (2002, 2003), and an article by Steinberg and Lerner (2004) were among the few recent discussions of this history prior to the present book. Accordingly, a key goal of the present work is to advance such historical scholarship. However, as we sought to formulate a plan to portray this history, we recognized that the methods of studying history, historiography, are varied. We needed to decide what approach may work best in understanding the history of the developmental science of adolescence.

Edwin G. Boring (1950, p. ix), in what is indisputably the most important and esteemed historical treatise in the social and behavioral sciences, the monumental A History of Experimental Psychology (1929, 1950), noted that Hermann Ebbinghaus, one of the 19th century pioneers of the science that was to be termed psychology, once observed that the field “has a long past, but only a short history.” The same point is true for the field we term “developmental science,” and as well for its areas of specialization, for instance, the developmental science of adolescence. The nature of the history of this field should be considered in selecting a methodological lens through which to view it.

Approaches to Recounting of the History of the Developmental Science of Adolescence

Adolescence is a term derivative of the Latin word adolescere, which means to grow up or to grow into maturity (Muuss, 1990). Muuss (1990) noted that the first use of the term adolescence appeared in the fifteenth century. However, more than 1,500 years before this first explicit use of the term, both Plato and Aristotle proposed sequential demarcations of the life span. In fact, Aristotle proposed stages of life that are not dissimilar from sequences that might be included in contemporary models of youth development (Lerner & Steinberg, 2009). He described three successive, seven-year periods (infancy, boyhood, and young manhood) prior to full, adult maturity.

About 2,000 years elapsed between these initial philosophical discussions of adolescence and the emergence within the twentieth century of the scientific study of this period of life, dated by the publication in 1904 of G. Stanley Hall's two-volume work on adolescence. The subsequent (at this writing) 109-year history of the scientific study of adolescence – a (relatively) short history, given the more than two-millennia span of interest in this age period – has been described by Lerner and Steinberg (2004, 2009) and Steinberg and Lerner (2004). One inference that is possible to draw from their historical reviews is that the developmental science of adolescence may be recounted accurately by describing the contributions of the set of scholars whose theoretically predicated empirical work and professional leadership shaped the field.

In fact, the rationale for reference to the work of such scientists as the basis for understanding the history of the structure and professional character of a scientific field, such as the developmental science of adolescence, has its foundation in Boring's A History of Experimental Psychology (1929, 1950). In discussing the nature of historiography, Boring reviewed several theories of history, bringing attention within social and behavioral science to the concepts of zeitgeist (spirit of the times) and ortgeist (spirit of the place) as ideas that speak to the role of the context in shaping the conduct of the scientists contributing to a given field. From these views, it is the context – time or place (Elder, 1998; Elder, Modell, & Parke, 1993; Elder & Shanahan, 2006) – that shapes the person. In turn, Boring contrasted such ideas with a view that suggests that it is the characteristics of the individual scientist that may create the ortgeist and may foster changes that contribute to the zeitgeist. In this view, it is the person who shapes the context.

Boring implies that these two views of the basis of historical change – the contextual and the personological – may not be mutually exclusive and, in so doing, forwards an idea that reflects contemporary ideas about human development. These are ideas that suggest that mutually influential relations between individuals and contexts provide the basis for systematic change across the life span and generations. As the person shapes the context, the context shapes the person. Examples of such ideas about bidirectional influences between individuals and their contexts are relational developmental systems models of human development (e.g., Overton, 2006, 2010, 2011; Overton & Mueller, 2012) and, more specifically, ideas about life-span (Baltes, Lindenberger, & Staudinger, 2006) and life-course (Elder, 1998; Elder & Shanahan, 2006) approaches to human development.

However, despite implying that person-context relations may be a basis for historical change, and perhaps because he was a psychologist, Boring traced the history of psychological science through recounting the contributions of scholars such as Johannes Müller, Pierre Flourens, Gottfried Leibniz, Gustav Fechner, Wilhelm Wundt, Franz Brentano, Hermann Ebbinghaus, Edward Bradford Titchner, William James, G. Stanley Hall, John Dewey, and numerous other European and American philosophers and scientists. Nevertheless, the stories he told of the genesis of the contributions of these scholars very much reflected the influences of both ortgeist and zeitgeist on their lives and their work. In essence, in Boring's (1929, 1950) account of the history of psychological science, person, time, and place all influenced the course of the history of a field (Elder, 1998).

In more recent accounts of the basis of change – at either individual or contextual levels or, especially, in regard to the relations among person, time, and place – another influence has emerged: Serendipity. As both Bandura (1982, 1998) and Lewis (1997) have explained, chance encounters, or serendipitous relations between individuals and contexts more generally (Napolitano, Bowers, Gestsdóttir, & Chase, 2011), play an important role in individuals' constructions of their lives and in historians' accounts of the bases of change in people and institutions, including fields of science. Indeed, in the sociology of science, Merton (1949/1957/1968), Merton and Barber (2004), and Barber and Fox (1958) have discussed the conditions under which personological characteristics of the scientist (for instance, self-regulatory processes, proclivity for risk-taking behaviors), and unexpected encounters with life or social events, anomalous laboratory findings, or chance meetings with people may combine to both shape the life of a scholar and the direction of a scientific field. Both life-course sociology and life span developmental psychology have also discussed such influences on individual and institutional history through the concepts of non-normative life or historical events (Baltes et al., 2006; Elder, 1998).

Integrating Person, Time, and Place in Recounting the History of the Developmental Science of Adolescence

Accordingly, we believe that it is useful to integrate the historiography approaches of Boring (1929, 1950), Bandura (1982, 1998), and others (Baltes et al., 2006; Barber & Fox, 1958; Elder, 1998; Lewis, 1997; Merton & Barber, 2004; Napolitano et al., 2011) to understand the role of person, time, and place in creating the structure and evolution of the developmental science of adolescence. Indeed, by focusing on the life stories of scientists we have a means to capture the unique integrations of person, time, and place that characterize all lives (Elder et al., 1993) and that may account for the insights, creative sparks, capitalization on serendipitous relations, and breakthroughs that characterize the work that may come to define the key facets of, and directions taken in, a scientific field.

We believe that this integrated historiography approach can be instantiated through autobiographical accounts. The confluence of person, time, and place can of course also be assessed by independent historians. However, autobiographical accounts have the asset of authenticity, although they do not necessarily provide complete objectivity. A complete historical overview of a field might, then, involve an approach that possesses the charm of authenticity that is tempered by independent analyses that contextualize the autobiographer within the broader stream of scientific progress. Clearly, then, our focus on autobiography does not involve the latter, tempering approach, and we therefore leave it to the reader or to other historiographers to supplement the approach we take in this book.

Nevertheless, we believe there is substantial value in the essays in this book. The chapters provide repeated evidence about the ideographic character of the life course and the scientific careers of the colleagues who, across the past four decades, have created as a separate field within the study of human ontogeny the developmental science of adolescence. We see how these colleagues interweave time and place, and often point to serendipitous relations, in accounting for the arc of their careers. These chapters reveal individual motivation and individual reflection, often as responses to serendipity. Together, the chapters underscore the varied paths that led these individuals to focus their scientific careers on the developmental science of adolescence.

For example, in Chapter 41, by Rainer K. Silbereisen, we learn that, had there not been a problem with teenage heroin users in Berlin at the time that he was searching for his first professorial position, he probably would not have entered into research on adolescence. In turn, without his personal relationships and interactions with people at the Max-Planck-Institute in Berlin he would not have subsequently met and established international collaborations with other scholars studying adolescent development, relationships that resulted in research grants and publications. These latter collaborations and achievements are part of the objective record available to independent scholars. However, the personal voice of Rainer Silbereisen grounds these features of his life and career in time and place as he experienced them.

Of course, just as person and context are embedded in time, so is this volume. As illustrated by the example drawn from the chapter by Rainer Silbereisen, the study of adolescent development has been an increasingly more internationally collaborative endeavor for more than three decades. Accordingly, we bring together in this volume leading scholars from several parts of the world, both to provide important sample cases of the international character of our field and, as well, to illustrate important variation in the nature and impact of time and place on the person.

Moreover, as will be evident from the group of scholars included in this book, we have focused on senior scholars, that is, we have include...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: The History of the Developmental Science of Adolescence: The Role of Autobiographical Perspectives
• 2 Confessions of a Heretic: My Unlikely Career as a So-Called Psychologist
• 3 Robert Wm. Blum: An Autobiography
• 4 Person, Time, and Place: The Life Course of a Developmental Psychologist
• 5 An Autobiographical Journey Through Adolescents' Social World: Peer Groups, Peer Influence, and the Effects of Electronic Media on Social Adjustment in College
• 6 Reflections on a Lifetime of Life-Course Research: Turning Opportunity into Passion
• 7 Journey to a Life-Course Perspective in Developmental Science
• 8 Why Adolescence Matters: An Autobiography of a Psychologist
• 9 Rand D. Conger: An Autobiography
• 10 A Stranger in Paradise: Fitting In, Managing Identities, and Reaching Out
• 11 My Research Life and Times
• 12 How Personal Experiences Influenced My Research on Youth
• 13 Following the Data (and Sometimes Theory): The Career of a Socioemotional Developmental Scientist
• 14 Studying Lives in Changing Times: A Life-Course Journey
• 15 Reflections on a Life Course of Developmental Criminology
• 16 My Turning Points in Adolescent Research: From Internal Dynamics to External Opportunities to Self-Governance of Development
• 17 From Ithaca to Los Angeles: Gaining Focus from Places and People
• 18 How I Became a Developmentalist
• 19 Exploring the Frontiers of Adolescent Psychology, Psychiatry, and Development
• 20 Decisions and Directions: Making a Path Through Life
• 21 Coming of Age: Karen Hein's Journey
• 22 Adolescents as Productive Processors of Reality: My Socialization Approach in Youth Research
• 23 Problem Behavior Theory: A Half-Century of Research on Adolescent Behavior and Development
• 24 Adolescent Thinking in Action: Minds in the Making
• 25 Studying Experience: Pursuing the “Something More”
• 26 Taking the Boy out of Brooklyn: Time, Place, and People in the Development of a Developmental Scientist
• 27 Doing “Good Time”
• 28 Individual Development—a Transformation Process: A Longitudinal Program
• 29 Growth and Development: The Interrelationship of Personal Experiences and Scientific Endeavors
• 30 The Life and Academic Journey of an Empiricist
• 31 Autobiography Through Adolescence
• 32 Researcher as Bumblebee: Developing a Science of Adolescence Integrating Biology, Using Rigorous Research Methods, and Including Girls
• 33 Self-Control at the Heart of Successful Development
• 34 Lucking Out: A Career Shaped by Mentoring
• 35 Growing Up in South Africa: Science, Politics, and Policy
• 36 Clinical–Psychological Contributions to Adolescence Research
• 37 Establishing Developmental Psychopathology
• 38 Born in Clever
• 39 If You Are Standing Around Just Watching, You Are Not Doing Your Job
• 40 Contributing to Adolescent Research in Non-Typical Ways: Pursuing the Many Faces of Social Cognition
• 41 Development as Action in Context
• 42 Studying Adolescent–Parent Relationships: A Personal History
• 43 Pursuing Identity-Focused Resiliency Research Post-Brown v. Board of Education 1954
• 44 The Importance of Serendipity
• 45 Lives in Transition: A Hormones and Behavior Odyssey
• 46 War, Family Secrets, Sports, and the Developmental Origins of Aggression
• 47 My Career Trajectory in Understanding the Ecological Realities of Adolescence in India
• 48 Yesterday's and Today's Adolescents: Different Contexts, Same Challenges?
• Appendix: Synopses of the Contributions of Deceased Colleagues to the Developmental Science of Adolescence
• Index