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

THE 4-H STUDY OF

POSITIVE YOUTH DEVELOPMENT

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

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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.”