The development of the developmental science of adolescence: Then, now, next—and necessary.

Abstract

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the contributions of the Handbook of Adolescent and Young Adult Development, edited by Crockett et al., to representing and advancing the developmental science of adolescence. Using concepts of developmental change, principally the orthogenetic principle (Raeff, 2016;Werner, 1957), we place this handbook within the developmental history of the field, and we contrast the substance of the handbook with the ways the developmental science of adolescence was presented in prior adolescent development handbooks. We take this approach because the publication of a handbook may be regarded as a watershed event and as a marker of historical progress, growing maturity, and the burgeoning impact of a field of scholarship.In the past 40 years, the developmental science of adolescence has been marked by the publication of four handbooks, edited by Adelson (1980), R. M. Steinberg (2004, 2009), and-now-Crockett et al. The goals of developmental science are to describe, explain, and optimize intraindividual change and interindividual differences in intraindividual change across the lifespan (Baltes et al., 1977;R. M. Lerner, 2018). The handbooks that have framed the past 4 decades of theory and research depict how each of these goals was operationalized at specific historical points in the development of the developmental science of adolescence.Developmental scientists are, in effect, historians of individuals' ontogenies. They recognize the importance of understanding the individual and contextual antecedents of behavior at a specific point in time and the implications of behavior at that timepoint for subsequent behavior. We will describe and explain past and current features of the developmental science of adolescence and, by placing this handbook into the historical moments within which it was conceived and completed, discuss ways in which the future of developmental science may evolve to serve both science and society. Accordingly, to depict the current status of the study of adolescence and to make projections about the future of the field, it is useful to begin by discussing the historical development (the ontogeny) of the science.