Children’s and Adolescents’ Conceptions of Adulthood: The Changing View of a Crucial Developmental Task

Abstract

Some years ago, Bronfenbrenner defined traditional developmental psychology as “the science of the strange behavior of children in strange situations with strange adults for the briefest possible period of time,” (Bronfenbrenner 1979, p. 19). This is no longer true. Individuals now are more often studied in their natural environments, and interactions between the environment and the individual are taken into consideration, even though many features of such studies remain at odds with the requirements of ecological research. However, the ecological approach neglects the cognitive development of the individual to a certain extent; it does not comply with the first part of Bronfenbrenner’s definition of human development as the “process through which the growing person acquires a more extended differentiated and valid conception of the environment” (Bronfenbrenner, 1979, p. 25). This process has been examined extensively by another research tradition, that of Piaget and the neo-Piagetians, who tried to describe the construction or reconstruction of the outer world through the individual’s cognitive activity. Another approach came from sociology and ethnomethodology (Me-han & Wood, 1975).