Journal of Adolescence 37 (2014) 1541e1545
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Journal of Adolescence journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jado
Some ideas on the emerging future of developmental research Marion Kloep a, *, Leo B. Hendry b a b
Camino del Aguacate 1, 11130 Chiclana de la Frontera, Spain Aberdeen University, UK
a r t i c l e i n f o
a b s t r a c t
Article history: Available online 26 September 2014
We are somewhat critical of the concept of emerging adulthood as a new developmental stage in modern industrial societies, and prefer the idea of systemic mechanisms and processes as the forces and factors that influence the transitions and transformations of human change across the life course. For this reason, we are pleased to see this volume is entirely dedicated to the life-phase of emerging adulthood in Mediterranean countries, suggesting that researchers are not convinced that the characteristics of emerging adulthood would be the same for young people from different cultures. While we are very positive towards this series of articles showing that emerging adulthood in Mediterranean countries has similarities, and, yet differences to other cultures, and appreciate the diverse findings of these research projects, we would want to suggest some new and more radical strategies for future developmental research. Concretely, a move away from age-bound, stage models towards a more dynamic and systemic approach to lifespan research, simply because we cannot ignore both the past and the future, whilst contemplating the present. © 2014 The Foundation for Professionals in Services for Adolescents. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
As avid readers amongst you will know, we are somewhat critical of the concept of emerging adulthood as a new developmental stage in modern industrial societies, and prefer the idea of systemic mechanisms and processes as the forces and factors that influence the transitions and transformations of human change across the life course (see, for example, Arnett, Kloep, Hendry, & Tanner, 2011; Hendry & Kloep, 2007a, 2007b, 2011). Nevertheless, we want to give Arnett credit for drawing attention to a period of the lifespan that had previously been neglected by researchers, and we are happy to accept ‘emerging adulthood’ as a description of that, just as we generally use terms such as ‘childhood’, ‘adolescence’, and ‘old-age’ when talking about aspects of the lifespan. Our main argument against his attempts at conceptual analysis is that a developmental theory needs to be universal, and not simply describe a certain sub-group belonging to a certain social class, gender, ethnicity or culture, nor a phenomenon that is likely to be altered by changing economic and psycho-social environments. For this reason, we are pleased to see this volume is entirely dedicated to the life-phase of emerging adulthood in Mediterranean countries. Even the compilation of such a volume as this indicates that researchers are not convinced that the characteristics of Arnett's emerging adulthood would be the same for young people from different cultures. So, you will find that the authors contend that cultural values such as ‘familism’, social welfare politics and macro-changes in society, such as
* Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (M. Kloep). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.adolescence.2014.09.002 0140-1971/© 2014 The Foundation for Professionals in Services for Adolescents. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1542
M. Kloep, L.B. Hendry / Journal of Adolescence 37 (2014) 1541e1545
the recent economic crisis (but maybe also climate is an interacting factor; nobody mentions it, surprisingly), impact hugely on transitions to adulthood. In other words, it is not human developmental trajectories, which have changed, but their contexts. Whenever the context changes, whether on the micro- or macro-level, individuals find coping strategies and their pathways through life will be affected. Glen Elder (1998) did not have to invent a new developmental stage in order to observe that the generations of the Great Depression found conditions during their time of growing up quite different from the socialising experiences of their parents and their own children. The same can be said, for instance, for the two World-War generations, for young people experiencing the political changes of the 1990s in Eastern European countries, and for immigrant children. For too long now many researchers more or less assumed that human development ends after adolescence when we reach the utopian stage of ‘adulthood’! For that reason, this newly awakened interest in the period of young adulthood is surely widening our horizons. But, has emerging adulthood now become the new adolescence? Do we now implicitly assume that there is a point, albeit a little later in life, and affected by the now-existing social conditions, where development more-or-less grinds to a halt? Or, alternatively, will the next decade bring us a surge of ‘emerging middle-age’ and ‘old-age’ research projects? Take for example the research on parentechild relationships. All these find that relationships change, and that turningpoints, such as children leaving home, becoming financially independent (or not) or getting romantically involved, play a part in this dynamic process. Additionally, earlier experiences have a part to play, such as the young person's perceptions of parenting style during her/his growing up. However, these are not the last turning points in life course trajectories, and subsequent experiences accumulate: Parents might become grandparents, they might divorce, or their children might separate from their partners and return home, and ultimately, parents might become dependent on their children for care in old-age. These life-events and the way they lead to new relational adaptations within a cultural and economic context will vary hugely for different individuals, as will the nature of their amassed earlier experiences. The further we progress in the life course, the more individual variation we will find. Commentary From our reading of the presented articles a number of points emerge that are important to mention. We will consider the following general aspects of the published research papers: (1) Analyses and theoretical frameworks, (2) Research methods employed, (3) Focus and research questions, (4) Some conclusions. Analyses and theoretical frameworks Taken generally, it was pleasing to see that in various ways some of the authors attempted to disaggregate findings, considered processes and had an awareness of the interactive effects of the variables under scrutiny. This led to an array of sophisticated analyses using quantitative, qualitative approaches, together with a few mixed methods projects. However, the very positive impact of this was lessened because the analyses of these somewhat complex, relational contexts were mainly static and interpretations were not always flexible and multi-sided. Some authors in this volume (e.g., Pnevmatikos & Bardos; Zupancic, Komidar, & Levpus cek) remark on the small amount of variance explained by the variables in their studies. To us, this is not a surprise. We would predict that the older the sample, the less variance we will be able to explain, and that it is actually the unexplained variance that tells us something about human development. The reason for this is not only the multiplying variety of behavioural opportunities that occur with growing life experiences. It is also inherent in the statistic approaches which we use. Complex and sophisticated as they are, most of them still assume uni-directional, linear and static relationships among variables, and treat unexplained variance as error. Actually, this is even true in qualitative approaches. As Sestito and Sica observe: “not all interviewees' profiles could be categorized neatly into one typology” e because there is no such thing as one or even a few typologies in the wide variety of human relations. By omitting to disaggregate results and allow for different dynamic developmental processes, we miss out on uncovering important points. For example, Oliveira, Mendonça, Coimbra and Fontaine were unable to find an association between parental financial support and young people's well-being, measuring financial support with a dummy variable. If we step back a moment from the cosmos of standardized self-report measures, means and standard deviations, and look around in the real world, we will find many examples of how financial support from parents can have all kinds of effects on young people's wellbeing, both positive, neutral, and negative. Financial assistance can mean so many things: the provision of education, healthy nutrition, stress relief, the affordability of drugs, alcohol and fast cars, it can be a symbol of love and care, guilt or a blackmailing device, it can enhance or prevent the acquisition of adequate economic coping skills and the development of independence. It will all depend on so many other influences that it would really be surprising if a general and significant correlation could be found. In any sample average, the good, the bad and the neutral effects will cancel each other out, so that no effect is found, while, in fact, many different ones exist. This is not only true for dummy variables, but also for more sophisticated scales, because their principle is to find general trends and to ignore individual pathways. Needless to say, crosssectional studies will tell us even less about the complicated interdependency of important variables in an individual's life, so we are rather surprised to find so many in this volume. As soon as disaggregation is carried out, different trajectories become visible, as the study by Shulman, Vasalampi, Barr, Liven, Nurmi and Pratt so clearly demonstrates. We are convinced that had they used a larger sample, they would have
M. Kloep, L.B. Hendry / Journal of Adolescence 37 (2014) 1541e1545
1543
detected at least a fourth group: one in which those with high civic engagement initially drop their involvement over the years. In a more person-centred approach, immediately patterns become visible that allow for more than tentative causeand-effect speculations, as some processes and mechanisms do appear. Fully in line with dynamic system theory's predictions (i.e. Granic, 2000; Kunnen, 2006, 2011), this study shows that career adaptation is a lengthy process, and that the transition itself goes along with disturbances in mental health, which tend to disappear when a new equilibrium e an adaptation to the status quo e is found. This interesting finding would not have been possible, if all the groups had been lumped together in one statistical analysis. Methods In none of the studies based on group averages is a high percentage of the variance explained, but rather complicated, difficult-to-interpret effects that vary hugely across gender, class and age of the respondents emerge. This is the more relevant as a sampling matter, as the majority of studies (with the exception of Kuhar & Reiter) use homogenous samples which consist only of students (Pnevmatikos & Bardos; Sestito & Sica; Lanz & Tagliabue) and/or respondents from the same region (e.g., a big city or its surroundings). Only Pnevmatikos and Bardos and Kuhar and Reiter use samples from different regions. Given that these selected groups of young people are most likely to be influenced by globalisation and not so much by the traditional Mediterranean values so often mentioned in the studies, results would have been even more diversified and different from the Americanised picture of emerging adults that we find in the literature, if representatives of rural Mediterranean young people (comprising between 31% of the population in Italy, 38% in Greece and Portugal, and 50% in Slovenia) were studied more intensely. Several of the authors of this volume pay lip-service to dynamic, person-in-context, co-constructional models of development. However, they then proceed to treat their variables as uni-directional cause-and-effect relationships. For example, of eight studies investigating parentechild relationship, only one (Lanz & Tagliabue) measures the parents' perspective as well as the young peoples', and promptly finds that outcomes are different for the two groups, which allows the conclusion that “the transition to adulthood is a joint enterprise between parents and their child and can be considered a family transition.” That there will be discrepancies in parents' and child-perceptions is well-known (see e.g., Ohannessian, Lerner, Lerner, & von Eye, 1995), and it can be assumed that this discrepancy alone would be a powerful factor in influencing the parentechild relationship. One quote from Sestito et al.'s study hints at that: “They see me as an adult, but I'm not”. Now here we have the narrative of a young person that parents over-estimate her, and her selfperception is that she does not see herself as an adult yet. Both evaluations might be true, a misconception or wishful thinking. In any case, to understand the dynamics of her conflict with her parents we would need to understand how she arrived at this conclusion within the family's interactions. So, at least would we need to know and analyse the parents' viewpoint as well. By only concentrating on one part of a multi-person interaction, and moreover, doing so by cross-sectional analysis, does not add much to our knowledge of transitions: Young adults living in conflict with their parents describe the parenting-style they experience as not enhancing autonomy (Sestito et al.), young people who have moved out describe their parents as more repressive (Kuhar & Reiter), whereas young people reporting more support from their parents for independence and selfautonomy say that they have better ‘uncertainty strategies’ and better well-being (Oliveira et al.). Now, does that mean that parental support enhances individuation, as the present authors tend to suggest, or are parents more willing to yield more autonomy to more mature offspring, or does young people's perception of their parents colour all the statements they make about them, or do they need to find an excuse for conflicts and striving for autonomy and willingly blame it on parents? Most likely, all of these interpretations are partially true and demonstrate that complex relational interactions are not static phenomena. The point we are making here is that within the new approach to human development as a life-long dynamic process within an open system of micro- and macro-level variables, we need to discover new research strategies and methods of analysis. The formation of a piece of crystal in nature, for example, can neither be predicted nor explained by the most complex statistical model (Gavezzotti, 1994). Neither can human development. Nevertheless, disaggregation and mixedmethod approaches (e.g., Shulman et al.; Crocetti & Meeus) are steps in this direction. For instance, Kunnen and her coworkers (Kunnen, 2011) have developed alternative methods to predict phase-transitions, Lewis and Granic (2000) explain how self-organisation during adaptation can be detected, von Eye and his co-workers (von Eye & Bogat, 2006; von Eye, Indurkhya, & Kreppner, 2000; von Eye, Mun, & Bogat, 2008; von Eye & Schuster, 2000) and Urban, Osgood, and Mabry (2011) present a whole range of new methods for analyzing developmental change and person-centred data, and their research gives vivid examples of what can be achieved by using alternative research and analytical methods. Richard Lerner and his colleagues (e.g., Lerner, Fisher, & Weinberg, 2000) have proposed a systemic approach also for interventions. Claiming that laboratory-based research is of little value for understanding real-life change, they propose the concept of ‘applied developmental science’. This implies conducting natural experiments in real communities, where multidisciplinary researchers monitor the impact of interventions constantly and directly in the field. It means process-oriented constant evaluation, using scientific criteria, and adaptations to the situation. The results would, of course, be specific to the context in which they are created. We strongly believe that this is the direction in which the future of developmental research will lie.
1544
M. Kloep, L.B. Hendry / Journal of Adolescence 37 (2014) 1541e1545
Focus and research questions However, it is not only methods in developmental research that need innovation. It is the focus, too. Though all the contributions in this volume introduce the topic of a prolonged transition to adulthood using macro-social variables such as cultural values and the economic situation as explanation, all the conclusions and recommendations centre on individuals. Equally interesting, though, would be a more sociological view on delayed transitions into adulthood: whether they depend on young people having choices in delaying to take on responsibilities or being prevented from doing so by their psychosocial ^ te , 2000; Hendry & Kloep, 2010; Kloep, Hendry, Gardner, & Seage, 2010), and what effects and/or material circumstances (Co will these ‘shifts’ have on the societies in which this remarkable trend is occurring. As an example, richer European countries such as Germany, already suffer from a deficit of highly educated young people (Hawley, 2013). Their resolution for the present is to encourage a young work force from other countries where the ‘indulgence’ of emerging adulthood has not yet appeared and young people achieve degrees at a younger age than Germans. It also provides significant opportunities for young women, who master many educational transitions earlier than their male peers (Peter & Horn, 2005). In a few years, leading positions in German industry and the public sector may well be occupied by females and immigrants from countries with different cultural norms. Whether this will be positive or negative, we will not speculate on here, but it will certainly have an influence on German society. In turn, how will such a ‘brain-drain’ from the countries that lose their best qualified young people change their society? Perhaps most significantly, what impact will the large-scale unemployment of low skilled youth have on their societies in the future? Moreover, as researchers, have we any important contributions to make on these macro-social developments? Conclusions To summarize: While we are very positive towards this series of articles showing that emerging adulthood in Mediterranean countries has similarities, and, yet differences to other cultures, and appreciate the diverse findings of these research projects, we would want to suggest some new and more radical strategies for future developmental research. In line with our criticisms of Arnett's approach, we would suggest a move away from age-bound, stage models towards a more dynamic and systemic approach to lifespan research, which would put more emphasis on explaining how and why humans change, rather than focussing on descriptive correlations between variables. We also recommend an increased emphasis not only on the ‘individual’ in ‘context’, but also on ways in which ‘the context’ is affected by individuals. Last but not least, such a holistic approach demands research that is multi-disciplinary in character e a developmental system-science that may push us all in the direction of becoming lifespan researchers, simply because we cannot ignore both the past and the future, whilst contemplating the present. References Arnett, J. J., Kloep, M., Hendry, L. B., & Tanner, J. L. (2011). Debating emerging adulthood: Stage or process? Oxford: Oxford University Press. ^ te , J. E. (2000). Arrested adulthood: The changing nature of identity in the late modern world. New York: NYU Press. Co Elder, G. H., Jr. (1998). Children of the great depression: 25th anniversary edition. Boulder CO: Westview Press. von Eye, A., & Bogat, G. A. (2006). Person-oriented and variable-oriented research: concepts, results, and development. Merrill Palmer Quarterly, 52, 390e420. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/mpq.2006.0032. von Eye, A., Indurkhya, A., & Kreppner, K. (2000). CFA as a tool for person-oriented research: unidimensional and within-individual analyses of nominal €ge, 42, 383e401. level and ordinal data. Psychologische Beitra von Eye, A., Mun, E. Y., & Bogat, G. A. (2008). Temporal patterns of variable relationships in person-oriented research: longitudinal models of Configural Frequency Analysis. Developmental Psychology, 44, 437e445. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.44.2.437. von Eye, A., & Schuster, C. (2000). The road to freedom: developmental methodology in the third millennium. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 24, 35e43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/016502500383458. Gavezzotti, A. (1994). Are crystal structures predictable? Accounts of Chemical Research, 27, 309e314. http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/ar00046a004. Granic, I. (2000). The self-organization of parent-child relations: beyond bi-directional models. In M. D. Lewis, & I. Granic (Eds.), Emotion, development and self-organization: Dynamic systems approaches to emotional development. New York: Cambridge University Press (pp. 267e297). Hawley, C. (2013). Help wanted: Will dearth of experts starve German economy? Spiegel Online International, 14. Available online on April 2013 at http:// www.spiegel.de/international/business/lack-of-skilled-labor-could-pose-future-threat-to-german-economy-a-894116.html. Hendry, L. B., & Kloep, M. (2007a). Conceptualizing emerging adulthood: Inspecting the emperor's new clothes? Child Development Perspectives, 1, 74e79. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1750-8606.2007.00017.x. Hendry, L. B., & Kloep, M. (2007b). Redressing the emperor! A rejoinder to Arnett. Child Development Perspectives, 1, 83e85. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.17508606.2007.00019.x. Hendry, L. B., & Kloep, M. (2010). How universal is emerging adulthood? Journal of Youth Studies, 13, 169e179. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/ 13676260903295067. Hendry, L. B., & Kloep, M. (2011). Adolescence and adulthood: Transitions and transformations. In Palgrave insights in psychology series. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kloep, M., Hendry, L. B., Gardner, C., & Seage, C. H. (2010). Young people's views of their present and future selves in two deprived communities. Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology, 20, 513e524. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/casp.1048. Kunnen, S. (2006). Are conflicts the motor in identity change? Identity, 6, 169e186. http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/s1532706xid0602_3. Kunnen, S. (Ed.). (2011). A dynamic systems approach of adolescent development. Hove: Psychology Press. Lerner, R. M., Fisher, C. B., & Weinberg, R. A. (2000). Toward a science for and of the people: promoting civil society through the application of developmental science. Child Development, 71, 11e20. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-8624.00113. Lewis, M. D., & Granic, I. (Eds.). (2000). Emotion, development, and self-organization: Dynamic systems approaches to emotional development. New York: Cambridge University Press. Ohannessian, C. M., Lerner, R. M., Lerner, J. V., & von Eye, A. (1995). Discrepancies in adolescents' and parents' perceptions of family functioning and adolescent emotional adjustment. The Journal of Early Adolescence, 15, 490e516. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0272431695015004006.
M. Kloep, L.B. Hendry / Journal of Adolescence 37 (2014) 1541e1545
1545
Peter, K., & Horn, L. (2005). Gender differences in participation and completion of undergraduate education and how they have changed over time (NCES 2005e169). U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Acessed at July 2014 on http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2005/2005169.pdf. Urban, J. B., Osgood, N., & Mabry, P. (2011). Developmental systems science: exploring the application of non-linear methods to developmental science questions. Research in Human Development, 8, 1e25. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15427609.2011.549686.
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Journal of Adolescence journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jado
Some ideas on the emerging future of developmental research Marion Kloep a, *, Leo B. Hendry b a b
Camino del Aguacate 1, 11130 Chiclana de la Frontera, Spain Aberdeen University, UK
a r t i c l e i n f o
a b s t r a c t
Article history: Available online 26 September 2014
We are somewhat critical of the concept of emerging adulthood as a new developmental stage in modern industrial societies, and prefer the idea of systemic mechanisms and processes as the forces and factors that influence the transitions and transformations of human change across the life course. For this reason, we are pleased to see this volume is entirely dedicated to the life-phase of emerging adulthood in Mediterranean countries, suggesting that researchers are not convinced that the characteristics of emerging adulthood would be the same for young people from different cultures. While we are very positive towards this series of articles showing that emerging adulthood in Mediterranean countries has similarities, and, yet differences to other cultures, and appreciate the diverse findings of these research projects, we would want to suggest some new and more radical strategies for future developmental research. Concretely, a move away from age-bound, stage models towards a more dynamic and systemic approach to lifespan research, simply because we cannot ignore both the past and the future, whilst contemplating the present. © 2014 The Foundation for Professionals in Services for Adolescents. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
As avid readers amongst you will know, we are somewhat critical of the concept of emerging adulthood as a new developmental stage in modern industrial societies, and prefer the idea of systemic mechanisms and processes as the forces and factors that influence the transitions and transformations of human change across the life course (see, for example, Arnett, Kloep, Hendry, & Tanner, 2011; Hendry & Kloep, 2007a, 2007b, 2011). Nevertheless, we want to give Arnett credit for drawing attention to a period of the lifespan that had previously been neglected by researchers, and we are happy to accept ‘emerging adulthood’ as a description of that, just as we generally use terms such as ‘childhood’, ‘adolescence’, and ‘old-age’ when talking about aspects of the lifespan. Our main argument against his attempts at conceptual analysis is that a developmental theory needs to be universal, and not simply describe a certain sub-group belonging to a certain social class, gender, ethnicity or culture, nor a phenomenon that is likely to be altered by changing economic and psycho-social environments. For this reason, we are pleased to see this volume is entirely dedicated to the life-phase of emerging adulthood in Mediterranean countries. Even the compilation of such a volume as this indicates that researchers are not convinced that the characteristics of Arnett's emerging adulthood would be the same for young people from different cultures. So, you will find that the authors contend that cultural values such as ‘familism’, social welfare politics and macro-changes in society, such as
* Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (M. Kloep). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.adolescence.2014.09.002 0140-1971/© 2014 The Foundation for Professionals in Services for Adolescents. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1542
M. Kloep, L.B. Hendry / Journal of Adolescence 37 (2014) 1541e1545
the recent economic crisis (but maybe also climate is an interacting factor; nobody mentions it, surprisingly), impact hugely on transitions to adulthood. In other words, it is not human developmental trajectories, which have changed, but their contexts. Whenever the context changes, whether on the micro- or macro-level, individuals find coping strategies and their pathways through life will be affected. Glen Elder (1998) did not have to invent a new developmental stage in order to observe that the generations of the Great Depression found conditions during their time of growing up quite different from the socialising experiences of their parents and their own children. The same can be said, for instance, for the two World-War generations, for young people experiencing the political changes of the 1990s in Eastern European countries, and for immigrant children. For too long now many researchers more or less assumed that human development ends after adolescence when we reach the utopian stage of ‘adulthood’! For that reason, this newly awakened interest in the period of young adulthood is surely widening our horizons. But, has emerging adulthood now become the new adolescence? Do we now implicitly assume that there is a point, albeit a little later in life, and affected by the now-existing social conditions, where development more-or-less grinds to a halt? Or, alternatively, will the next decade bring us a surge of ‘emerging middle-age’ and ‘old-age’ research projects? Take for example the research on parentechild relationships. All these find that relationships change, and that turningpoints, such as children leaving home, becoming financially independent (or not) or getting romantically involved, play a part in this dynamic process. Additionally, earlier experiences have a part to play, such as the young person's perceptions of parenting style during her/his growing up. However, these are not the last turning points in life course trajectories, and subsequent experiences accumulate: Parents might become grandparents, they might divorce, or their children might separate from their partners and return home, and ultimately, parents might become dependent on their children for care in old-age. These life-events and the way they lead to new relational adaptations within a cultural and economic context will vary hugely for different individuals, as will the nature of their amassed earlier experiences. The further we progress in the life course, the more individual variation we will find. Commentary From our reading of the presented articles a number of points emerge that are important to mention. We will consider the following general aspects of the published research papers: (1) Analyses and theoretical frameworks, (2) Research methods employed, (3) Focus and research questions, (4) Some conclusions. Analyses and theoretical frameworks Taken generally, it was pleasing to see that in various ways some of the authors attempted to disaggregate findings, considered processes and had an awareness of the interactive effects of the variables under scrutiny. This led to an array of sophisticated analyses using quantitative, qualitative approaches, together with a few mixed methods projects. However, the very positive impact of this was lessened because the analyses of these somewhat complex, relational contexts were mainly static and interpretations were not always flexible and multi-sided. Some authors in this volume (e.g., Pnevmatikos & Bardos; Zupancic, Komidar, & Levpus cek) remark on the small amount of variance explained by the variables in their studies. To us, this is not a surprise. We would predict that the older the sample, the less variance we will be able to explain, and that it is actually the unexplained variance that tells us something about human development. The reason for this is not only the multiplying variety of behavioural opportunities that occur with growing life experiences. It is also inherent in the statistic approaches which we use. Complex and sophisticated as they are, most of them still assume uni-directional, linear and static relationships among variables, and treat unexplained variance as error. Actually, this is even true in qualitative approaches. As Sestito and Sica observe: “not all interviewees' profiles could be categorized neatly into one typology” e because there is no such thing as one or even a few typologies in the wide variety of human relations. By omitting to disaggregate results and allow for different dynamic developmental processes, we miss out on uncovering important points. For example, Oliveira, Mendonça, Coimbra and Fontaine were unable to find an association between parental financial support and young people's well-being, measuring financial support with a dummy variable. If we step back a moment from the cosmos of standardized self-report measures, means and standard deviations, and look around in the real world, we will find many examples of how financial support from parents can have all kinds of effects on young people's wellbeing, both positive, neutral, and negative. Financial assistance can mean so many things: the provision of education, healthy nutrition, stress relief, the affordability of drugs, alcohol and fast cars, it can be a symbol of love and care, guilt or a blackmailing device, it can enhance or prevent the acquisition of adequate economic coping skills and the development of independence. It will all depend on so many other influences that it would really be surprising if a general and significant correlation could be found. In any sample average, the good, the bad and the neutral effects will cancel each other out, so that no effect is found, while, in fact, many different ones exist. This is not only true for dummy variables, but also for more sophisticated scales, because their principle is to find general trends and to ignore individual pathways. Needless to say, crosssectional studies will tell us even less about the complicated interdependency of important variables in an individual's life, so we are rather surprised to find so many in this volume. As soon as disaggregation is carried out, different trajectories become visible, as the study by Shulman, Vasalampi, Barr, Liven, Nurmi and Pratt so clearly demonstrates. We are convinced that had they used a larger sample, they would have
M. Kloep, L.B. Hendry / Journal of Adolescence 37 (2014) 1541e1545
1543
detected at least a fourth group: one in which those with high civic engagement initially drop their involvement over the years. In a more person-centred approach, immediately patterns become visible that allow for more than tentative causeand-effect speculations, as some processes and mechanisms do appear. Fully in line with dynamic system theory's predictions (i.e. Granic, 2000; Kunnen, 2006, 2011), this study shows that career adaptation is a lengthy process, and that the transition itself goes along with disturbances in mental health, which tend to disappear when a new equilibrium e an adaptation to the status quo e is found. This interesting finding would not have been possible, if all the groups had been lumped together in one statistical analysis. Methods In none of the studies based on group averages is a high percentage of the variance explained, but rather complicated, difficult-to-interpret effects that vary hugely across gender, class and age of the respondents emerge. This is the more relevant as a sampling matter, as the majority of studies (with the exception of Kuhar & Reiter) use homogenous samples which consist only of students (Pnevmatikos & Bardos; Sestito & Sica; Lanz & Tagliabue) and/or respondents from the same region (e.g., a big city or its surroundings). Only Pnevmatikos and Bardos and Kuhar and Reiter use samples from different regions. Given that these selected groups of young people are most likely to be influenced by globalisation and not so much by the traditional Mediterranean values so often mentioned in the studies, results would have been even more diversified and different from the Americanised picture of emerging adults that we find in the literature, if representatives of rural Mediterranean young people (comprising between 31% of the population in Italy, 38% in Greece and Portugal, and 50% in Slovenia) were studied more intensely. Several of the authors of this volume pay lip-service to dynamic, person-in-context, co-constructional models of development. However, they then proceed to treat their variables as uni-directional cause-and-effect relationships. For example, of eight studies investigating parentechild relationship, only one (Lanz & Tagliabue) measures the parents' perspective as well as the young peoples', and promptly finds that outcomes are different for the two groups, which allows the conclusion that “the transition to adulthood is a joint enterprise between parents and their child and can be considered a family transition.” That there will be discrepancies in parents' and child-perceptions is well-known (see e.g., Ohannessian, Lerner, Lerner, & von Eye, 1995), and it can be assumed that this discrepancy alone would be a powerful factor in influencing the parentechild relationship. One quote from Sestito et al.'s study hints at that: “They see me as an adult, but I'm not”. Now here we have the narrative of a young person that parents over-estimate her, and her selfperception is that she does not see herself as an adult yet. Both evaluations might be true, a misconception or wishful thinking. In any case, to understand the dynamics of her conflict with her parents we would need to understand how she arrived at this conclusion within the family's interactions. So, at least would we need to know and analyse the parents' viewpoint as well. By only concentrating on one part of a multi-person interaction, and moreover, doing so by cross-sectional analysis, does not add much to our knowledge of transitions: Young adults living in conflict with their parents describe the parenting-style they experience as not enhancing autonomy (Sestito et al.), young people who have moved out describe their parents as more repressive (Kuhar & Reiter), whereas young people reporting more support from their parents for independence and selfautonomy say that they have better ‘uncertainty strategies’ and better well-being (Oliveira et al.). Now, does that mean that parental support enhances individuation, as the present authors tend to suggest, or are parents more willing to yield more autonomy to more mature offspring, or does young people's perception of their parents colour all the statements they make about them, or do they need to find an excuse for conflicts and striving for autonomy and willingly blame it on parents? Most likely, all of these interpretations are partially true and demonstrate that complex relational interactions are not static phenomena. The point we are making here is that within the new approach to human development as a life-long dynamic process within an open system of micro- and macro-level variables, we need to discover new research strategies and methods of analysis. The formation of a piece of crystal in nature, for example, can neither be predicted nor explained by the most complex statistical model (Gavezzotti, 1994). Neither can human development. Nevertheless, disaggregation and mixedmethod approaches (e.g., Shulman et al.; Crocetti & Meeus) are steps in this direction. For instance, Kunnen and her coworkers (Kunnen, 2011) have developed alternative methods to predict phase-transitions, Lewis and Granic (2000) explain how self-organisation during adaptation can be detected, von Eye and his co-workers (von Eye & Bogat, 2006; von Eye, Indurkhya, & Kreppner, 2000; von Eye, Mun, & Bogat, 2008; von Eye & Schuster, 2000) and Urban, Osgood, and Mabry (2011) present a whole range of new methods for analyzing developmental change and person-centred data, and their research gives vivid examples of what can be achieved by using alternative research and analytical methods. Richard Lerner and his colleagues (e.g., Lerner, Fisher, & Weinberg, 2000) have proposed a systemic approach also for interventions. Claiming that laboratory-based research is of little value for understanding real-life change, they propose the concept of ‘applied developmental science’. This implies conducting natural experiments in real communities, where multidisciplinary researchers monitor the impact of interventions constantly and directly in the field. It means process-oriented constant evaluation, using scientific criteria, and adaptations to the situation. The results would, of course, be specific to the context in which they are created. We strongly believe that this is the direction in which the future of developmental research will lie.
1544
M. Kloep, L.B. Hendry / Journal of Adolescence 37 (2014) 1541e1545
Focus and research questions However, it is not only methods in developmental research that need innovation. It is the focus, too. Though all the contributions in this volume introduce the topic of a prolonged transition to adulthood using macro-social variables such as cultural values and the economic situation as explanation, all the conclusions and recommendations centre on individuals. Equally interesting, though, would be a more sociological view on delayed transitions into adulthood: whether they depend on young people having choices in delaying to take on responsibilities or being prevented from doing so by their psychosocial ^ te , 2000; Hendry & Kloep, 2010; Kloep, Hendry, Gardner, & Seage, 2010), and what effects and/or material circumstances (Co will these ‘shifts’ have on the societies in which this remarkable trend is occurring. As an example, richer European countries such as Germany, already suffer from a deficit of highly educated young people (Hawley, 2013). Their resolution for the present is to encourage a young work force from other countries where the ‘indulgence’ of emerging adulthood has not yet appeared and young people achieve degrees at a younger age than Germans. It also provides significant opportunities for young women, who master many educational transitions earlier than their male peers (Peter & Horn, 2005). In a few years, leading positions in German industry and the public sector may well be occupied by females and immigrants from countries with different cultural norms. Whether this will be positive or negative, we will not speculate on here, but it will certainly have an influence on German society. In turn, how will such a ‘brain-drain’ from the countries that lose their best qualified young people change their society? Perhaps most significantly, what impact will the large-scale unemployment of low skilled youth have on their societies in the future? Moreover, as researchers, have we any important contributions to make on these macro-social developments? Conclusions To summarize: While we are very positive towards this series of articles showing that emerging adulthood in Mediterranean countries has similarities, and, yet differences to other cultures, and appreciate the diverse findings of these research projects, we would want to suggest some new and more radical strategies for future developmental research. In line with our criticisms of Arnett's approach, we would suggest a move away from age-bound, stage models towards a more dynamic and systemic approach to lifespan research, which would put more emphasis on explaining how and why humans change, rather than focussing on descriptive correlations between variables. We also recommend an increased emphasis not only on the ‘individual’ in ‘context’, but also on ways in which ‘the context’ is affected by individuals. Last but not least, such a holistic approach demands research that is multi-disciplinary in character e a developmental system-science that may push us all in the direction of becoming lifespan researchers, simply because we cannot ignore both the past and the future, whilst contemplating the present. References Arnett, J. J., Kloep, M., Hendry, L. B., & Tanner, J. L. (2011). Debating emerging adulthood: Stage or process? Oxford: Oxford University Press. ^ te , J. E. (2000). Arrested adulthood: The changing nature of identity in the late modern world. New York: NYU Press. Co Elder, G. H., Jr. (1998). Children of the great depression: 25th anniversary edition. Boulder CO: Westview Press. von Eye, A., & Bogat, G. A. (2006). Person-oriented and variable-oriented research: concepts, results, and development. Merrill Palmer Quarterly, 52, 390e420. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/mpq.2006.0032. von Eye, A., Indurkhya, A., & Kreppner, K. (2000). CFA as a tool for person-oriented research: unidimensional and within-individual analyses of nominal €ge, 42, 383e401. level and ordinal data. Psychologische Beitra von Eye, A., Mun, E. Y., & Bogat, G. A. (2008). Temporal patterns of variable relationships in person-oriented research: longitudinal models of Configural Frequency Analysis. Developmental Psychology, 44, 437e445. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.44.2.437. von Eye, A., & Schuster, C. (2000). The road to freedom: developmental methodology in the third millennium. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 24, 35e43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/016502500383458. Gavezzotti, A. (1994). Are crystal structures predictable? Accounts of Chemical Research, 27, 309e314. http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/ar00046a004. Granic, I. (2000). The self-organization of parent-child relations: beyond bi-directional models. In M. D. Lewis, & I. Granic (Eds.), Emotion, development and self-organization: Dynamic systems approaches to emotional development. New York: Cambridge University Press (pp. 267e297). Hawley, C. (2013). Help wanted: Will dearth of experts starve German economy? Spiegel Online International, 14. Available online on April 2013 at http:// www.spiegel.de/international/business/lack-of-skilled-labor-could-pose-future-threat-to-german-economy-a-894116.html. Hendry, L. B., & Kloep, M. (2007a). Conceptualizing emerging adulthood: Inspecting the emperor's new clothes? Child Development Perspectives, 1, 74e79. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1750-8606.2007.00017.x. Hendry, L. B., & Kloep, M. (2007b). Redressing the emperor! A rejoinder to Arnett. Child Development Perspectives, 1, 83e85. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.17508606.2007.00019.x. Hendry, L. B., & Kloep, M. (2010). How universal is emerging adulthood? Journal of Youth Studies, 13, 169e179. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/ 13676260903295067. Hendry, L. B., & Kloep, M. (2011). Adolescence and adulthood: Transitions and transformations. In Palgrave insights in psychology series. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kloep, M., Hendry, L. B., Gardner, C., & Seage, C. H. (2010). Young people's views of their present and future selves in two deprived communities. Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology, 20, 513e524. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/casp.1048. Kunnen, S. (2006). Are conflicts the motor in identity change? Identity, 6, 169e186. http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/s1532706xid0602_3. Kunnen, S. (Ed.). (2011). A dynamic systems approach of adolescent development. Hove: Psychology Press. Lerner, R. M., Fisher, C. B., & Weinberg, R. A. (2000). Toward a science for and of the people: promoting civil society through the application of developmental science. Child Development, 71, 11e20. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-8624.00113. Lewis, M. D., & Granic, I. (Eds.). (2000). Emotion, development, and self-organization: Dynamic systems approaches to emotional development. New York: Cambridge University Press. Ohannessian, C. M., Lerner, R. M., Lerner, J. V., & von Eye, A. (1995). Discrepancies in adolescents' and parents' perceptions of family functioning and adolescent emotional adjustment. The Journal of Early Adolescence, 15, 490e516. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0272431695015004006.
M. Kloep, L.B. Hendry / Journal of Adolescence 37 (2014) 1541e1545
1545
Peter, K., & Horn, L. (2005). Gender differences in participation and completion of undergraduate education and how they have changed over time (NCES 2005e169). U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Acessed at July 2014 on http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2005/2005169.pdf. Urban, J. B., Osgood, N., & Mabry, P. (2011). Developmental systems science: exploring the application of non-linear methods to developmental science questions. Research in Human Development, 8, 1e25. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15427609.2011.549686.
