This volume is the outcome of a remarkably stimulating conference on “New Perspectives on Adolescent Risk, Behavior” held in Los Angeles on June 28–30, 1996. The conference was an effort to capture and consolidate the pervasive changes that were taking place in the way in which adolescent risk behavior was being studied at the close of the century – changes in conceptualization, in research design, and in analytic methods. The contextualization of risk behavior, its embeddedness in life–span developmental process, and the new explanatory concern with protection as well as risk were only a few of the ways in which contemporary inquiry had been transformed from its earlier orientations.

An interdisciplinary group of distinguished scholars whose own work had contributed to the transformation was assembled for 3 days of presentations and intense interchange. Each scholar had been charged with the tasks of identifying new trends in the field in which he or she was working, considering empirical exemplifications of those trends, and reflecting on their implications for future research. The chapters in this volume, all extensively revised in light of the conference discussions, are the final product. Together they limn the outlines of an agenda for inquiry about adolescent risk behavior at the opening of a new century.

The idea for the conference and for a subsequent volume was conceived during the editor's 1995–1996 tenure as a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.