Advancing Responsible Adolescent Development

Brief Overview

This series advances disciplinary and multidisciplinary inquiry into the individual, social, biological, and institutional responses to adolescents and their development. It champions research that examines conditions that either stifle or enhance responsible development.

Description

Responsible adolescent development - one that is healthy, fulfilling, engaged, and respectful of one's self and others - requires responsive relationships with families, peers, neighbors, schools, community organizations, religious institutions, and other socializing systems. All these socializing influences reach optimal effectiveness when reinforced by appropriate social policies and norms at local, cultural, state, national, international and global levels. This series examines the wide variety of sources that shape responses to adolescents and responsible development. This series explores these complex sources by exhibiting theories, models, research studies, and symposia that examine multiple dimensions of adolescent development.

Drawing from numerous disciplines, the series examines dimensions and experiences of adolescent development that contribute to responsibility (including irresponsibility) in multiple contexts and settings. The focus on multiple arenas of development necessarily encompasses the need to center on adolescents as well as on the conditions in which they live. Thus, the series publishes manuscripts that speak to issues adolescents face, but does not require that texts directly study adolescents themselves. Manuscripts may examine images and portrayals of adolescents through, for example, cultural assumptions of parenting, media depictions, religious groups' proselytizing, schooling's hidden curriculum, justice systems' presumptions, clinicians' interventions, and many other potential influences on adolescent development. The broadening of the disciplinary and multidisciplinary study of adolescence, however, does not mean that the series ignores core issues from adolescents' own perspectives, such as adolescents' experiences with significant others and with the wide variety of tasks, risks, and opportunities they encounter.