Upload
doancong
View
221
Download
1
Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
POSITIVE YOUTH DEVELOPMENT: A RELATIONAL DEVELOPMENTAL
SYSTEMS APPROACH
Richard M. Lerner and G. John Geldhof
Tufts University
• G. Stanley Hall (1904), of Clark University, founded the study of adolescence.
• Hall defined adolescence as a period of universal and inevitable, biologically-based “storm and stress.”
• Therefore, according to Hall, Anna Freud, and Erik Erikson, adolescence was a period of crisis and disturbance.
• These ideas resulted in the view that adolescents were "broken" or in danger of becoming "broken."
• For almost all of the 20th century most research about adolescence was based on this deficit conception of young people.
What We THOUGHT
We Knew About Adolescence
As early as the 1960s, research began to show
that the deficit model was not in fact true:
• There are problems that occur during adolescence. BUT there are problems that occur in infancy, childhood, and adulthood as well.
• All age periods have challenges, and the fact that there are life problems in the teenage years does not in and of itself make it a special period.
• The adolescent years may have some age-typical problems, but so too do all other age periods.
• Adolescents who have an especially stormy decade also tend to have had a problematic childhood as well.
• The stereotypes of adolescent problems evaporate in the light of actual research.
What Research TELLS Us About the
Presumed “Deficits” of Teens
• Most young people do NOT have a stormy adolescent period.
• Although adolescents spend increasingly more time with peers than with parents, most adolescents still value their relationships with parents enormously.
• Most adolescents have core values (e.g., about the importance of education in one’s life, about social justice, and about spirituality) that are consistent with those of their parents.
• Most adolescents select friends who share these core values.
Research Contradicts the Stereotypes
of the Teenage Years
• Into much of the 1990s most research continued to use Hall’s deficit model to study adolescence.
• Literally hundreds of millions of dollars continue to be spent each year in the United States to reduce the problems “caused” by the alleged biologically (indeed evolutionary) based deficits of adolescents.
But the Deficit Models Do Not Die.
They don’t even seem to fade away…
In the 1990s a new vision of the teen years emerged from biology and developmental science.
This is the Positive Youth Development (PYD) perspective.
The Birth of a New Phase in the
Scientific Study of Adolescence
Derived from a developmental science
approach to description, explanation,
and optimization that is informed by
relational developmental systems
models:
Baltes, Reese, and Nesselroade (1977)
Overton (2006, 2010; Overton & Mueller, in
press)
Foundations of the PYD Perspective: 1
• A relational metamodel
The integration of levels of organization
Developmental regulation across ontogeny involves mutually influential individual context relations
Integrated actions, individual context relations, are the basic unit of analysis within human development
Temporality and plasticity in human development
Defining Features of Relational
Developmental Systems Theories
• Plasticity is relative
• Intraindividual change, interindividual differences in
intraindividual change, and the fundamental substantive
significance of diversity
• Optimism, the application of developmental science, and
the promotion of positive human development
• Multidisciplinarity and the need for relational and change-
sensitive methodologies
Defining Features of Relational
Developmental Systems Theories
(Continued)
Derived from theory in evolutionary biology and
comparative psychology:
For example, the work of Greenberg, Gottlieb, Gould,
Ho, Jablonka, Kuo, Lamb, Lewontin, Schneirla, Suomi,
and Tobach
Derived from data in evolutionary biology and
comparative psychology about plasticity (the potential for
systematic change across the life span) and adaptive
developmental regulations (mutually beneficial individual
context relations:
The work of “action” theorists (e.g., Baltes,
Brandtstädter, Freund, and Heckhausen)
Foundations of the PYD Perspective: 2
Derived from formal reports (reviews of
evaluation research) about, and
informal reports (practitioner
assessments) of, the efficacy of youth
development programs:
The work of Roth and Brooks Gunn (2003)
The Work of Blum (2003)
Foundations of the PYD Perspective: 3
1. Because of the potential to change,
all youth have strengths.
2. All contexts have strengths as well.
These strengths are resources that
may be used to promote positive
youth development.
3. These resources are termed
“developmental assets”. They are
the “social nutrients” needed for
healthy development.
The PYD Perspective:
Six Core Concepts
4. These assets are found in families,
schools, faith institutions, youth serving
organizations, and the community more
generally.
5. If the strengths of youth are combined
with ecological developmental assets,
then positive, healthy development may
occur.
6. We should be optimistic that it is in our
power to promote positive development
among ALL youth and to create more
asset-rich settings supporting such
development among ALL youth.
The PYD Perspective:
Six Core Concepts
Jennifer Agans Miriam R. Arbeit Edmond Bowers
Michelle Boyd Paul Chase
Lisette DeSouza John Geldhof Heidi Johnson
Megan Kiely Mueller
Jacqueline V. Lerner Jarrett Lerner
Richard M. Lerner Christopher Napolitano
Dee Pratti Kristina Schmid
Amy E. A. Warren Michelle Weiner
TIME
+
_
Ad
ap
tive
Dev
elop
men
tal
Reg
ula
tion
s
Bro
ad
er E
colo
gy o
f H
um
an
Dev
elop
men
t ?
METHODOLOGICAL PROBLEMATICS
IN USING RELATIONAL
DEVELOPMENTAL SYSTEMS THEORY
TO FRAME PYD RESEARCH
Issues of Design, Measures, and Analyses
DESIGN •Primarily survey methods are used • Data collection is usually done annually •Single cohort longitudinal designs, or cohort sequential designs, are typically used, with Ns ranging from about 1,000 to more than 7,000 •Should PYD researchers use more frequent (e.g., even daily) observational data from individuals and contexts and use scores that index mutual actions, or coactions? •Would burst designs be useful here?
MEASURES •Largely self-report data are collected •Little triangulation across informants or methods •Because of challenges of high-frequency data collection, should PYD researchers frame questionnaires such that individual characteristics, environmental characteristics, and ideographic attitudes toward self- environment fit are measured? •Should PYD researchers study person-environment fit from a macroscopic (“microgenetic”) level, so that insights about short-duration but important (“tipping point”) phenomena are not missed? •Need measures that are designed to be sensitive to change
DATA ANALYSIS Overton, Research In Human Development (in
press):
“The relational developmental systems
approach has lacked a toolbox of nonlinear
analytic methods and, as a consequence, has
often been in the unfortunate position of
attempting to express nonadditivity effects in
an additive context.”
DATA ANALYSIS Types of analyses that have used to bring
data to bear on the individual context
relations involved in PYD:
•Cluster analysis
•Multilevel modeling (MLM)
•Mixture models
DATA ANALYSIS What analyses might be added to the toolbox?
Are systems science methods the answer?
• State space grids: Allow the mapping of behavior in real time, provide graphical representations of attractors, and measure developmental change based on differences in grid parameters.
• System dynamics: Characterized by modeling a system as a set of interrelated compartments (“stocks” or “accumulations”), and by rates of transition between stocks or flows.
• Agent-based models: Models constructed from the bottom up, wherein individual “agents” are constructed using a software application in which the modeler specifies the rules and associated probabilities of behavior for each agent.
• Network analysis: A general term for the study of the structure of relations among entities, and involves a set of tools or methods that can be used to analyze the structure of networks, examine how this structure evolves over time, and draw inferences about whether structural characteristics (e.g., connectedness, average distance between nodes, clustering) are related to some outcome of interest.
Based on Urban, Osgood, and Mabry (RHD, 2011)
INTEGRATING METHODS Can we encourage traditionally-trained researchers
to consider systems science methods?
• Most questions can be answered with “it depends”
• Simulation-based methodologies can help us decide what “it depends” on
• Systems science methodologies complement – not replace – traditional
methods
• A balance of methods can temper specificity with generality
• Study design can increase the usefulness of high-frequency data
• High-frequency bursts can be folded into more typical designs
• The rate of measurement should match the rate of a developmental process
CONCLUSIONS Overton, Research In Human Development (in press): “The fact that … nonlinear analytic methods have been emerging and are being employed with increasing frequency is refreshing and encouraging. Certainly the continuing development of nonlinear analytic methods will go a long way to avoiding conceptual confusions.”