Preface

It was a brief conversation between the two of us in Atlanta at the Society for Research in Child Development in 2005 that set the wheels rolling and resulted in this book. It was a time of mounting excitement over new and broad-based findings about adolescent development, including new findings on adolescent brain development, risk taking, identity development, peer and family relations, and contextual and cultural influences. These findings were seen as evidence of biological and socio-contextual factors on adolescent development and further proof that a constructivist framework for understanding adolescent development, once in its ascendancy, is now in decline.

As developmental psychologists, we never found the new findings particularly incompatible with a broadly constructivist framework, a point we reaffirmed in our discussions in Atlanta. We decided then and there that there was value in organizing a conference on adolescent development from a constructivist perspective to make sense of the new findings. Our goal was to reinvigorate the constructivist approach to adolescent development, which we saw as being unnecessarily dismissed as irrelevant to research and theory in adolescence.