Background: Enacting good science in pursuing the international study of positive youth development (PYD) requires using sound developmental theory to formulate questions that are tested through employing rigorous, change-sensitive measures, designs, and data analyses that are aimed at describing, explaining, or optimizing thriving among the…

Although Eriksonian theory suggests that adolescents' sense of fidelity is a key component of healthy development, research on this psychosocial construct has been limited. The current study developed an index of youth fidelity, examined the developmental course of this construct, explored the influence of contextual factors on different fidelity…

Both organismic and intentional self-regulation processes must be integrated across childhood and adolescence for adaptive developmental regulations to exist and for the developing person to thrive, both during the first two decades of life and through the adult years. To date, such an integrated, life-span approach to self-regulation during…

The positive youth development (PYD) perspective emphasizes that thriving occurs when individual [double arrow] context relations involve the alignment of adolescent strengths with the resources in their contexts. The authors propose that a key component of this relational process is the strength that youth possess in the form of self-regulatory…

Developmental system theories recognize that variables from multiple levels of organization within the bioecology of human development contribute to adolescent development, including individual factors, family factors and the neighborhood which includes extracurricular activities. Extracurricular activities provide a context for youth development,…

This article provides an overview of the history of research on adolescence. In our view, the history of the scientific study of adolescence has had two overlapping phases and is now on the cusp of a third. The first phase, which began early in the 20th century and lasted about 70 years, was characterized by grand theoretical models that…

Reviews the current status of the study of adolescent development, with particular emphasis on "Handbook of Adolescent Psychology." Presents some projections about future research and theory. (Author/ST)