Abstract
The field of adolescent research is young, as academic fields go. Although G. Stanley Hall published his two-volume magnum opus on adolescence in 1904, for most of the 20th century there was little research on adolescent development. The focus in developmental psychology was on young children, because it was presumed that everything important in development happened in the early years of life. The Society for Research on Adolescence (SRA) was only established in 1986, just 30 years ago. Emerging adulthood is even younger, as a field. The article first articulating the theory was published in 2000 (Arnett, 2000), and the Society for the Study of Emerging Adulthood (SSEA) was established in 2013.
How are we doing so far, in representing the cultural diversity of adolescence and emerging adulthood in our research? Overall, it must be admitted, most research so far has focused on middle-class Americans. This is not only true of adolescence and emerging adulthood but also true of all research in psychology, as I described in 2008 in an article entitled The Neglected 95%: Why American Psychology Need to Become Less American (Arnett, 2008). The samples, authors, and editors in all branches of psychology are overwhelmingly American.
There are a number of reasons for American dominance of research in psychology (Arnett, 2008). The most obvious is that there is more money for research in the United States than in all other countries combined. The United States has a system of research universities that is remarkably extensive, with more than 4,000 colleges and universities in all. In addition, there are numerous research institutes and research centers. Funding is abundant, compared to the rest of the world. No other country has anything comparable to the National Institutes of Health or the National Science Foundation, and there are also many private research foundations such as the Spencer Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the William T. Grant Foundation. The rich get researched, and the United States is by far the wealthiest country in the world, as measured by total economic output.
Also important, however, is how we think about human development and what kinds of goals we have for our research. Specifically, psychology has a long history of searching for human universals. For over a century, psychologists have been searching for laws and principles of psychology that would apply to all people in all places at all times, like the laws and principles of sciences such as physics and chemistry. This search assumed that people everywhere are like people anywhere. You could study American undergraduate introductory psychology students and then generalize to the rest of the world’s many billions of human beings, because they could all be assumed to have the same psychological structure. Under this assumption, culture was an annoyance, a variable that distracted from the pursuit of universals and so was best ignored or minimized.
This assumption, and the pursuit of universals it underlies, have been critiqued vigorously in recent decades by cultural psychologists (Jensen, 2011, 2015; Shweder et al., 2006). Researchers taking a cultural perspective have revealed the limitations of universalistic assumptions, and have demonstrated that it is untrue that people everywhere are like people anywhere. On the contrary, people develop in startlingly different ways depending on the culture where they happen to be born and grow up. To give one example, the finding from American psychology that adolescents often grow more emotionally distant from their parents was long presumed to be universal, and even to have an evolutionary basis, in the incest taboo (Steinberg, 1988). However, once research began to explore relationships between adolescents and parents outside the American middle class, this claim was quickly refuted. In fact, in most the world relations between adolescents and parents grow closer, especially between mothers and daughters (Larson, Wilson, & Rickman, 2010). The American pattern of increased emotional distance in adolescence is not one example of a universal phenomenon but an aberration.
The Journal of Adolescent Research (JAR) has been a leader in recent years in expanding the cultural scope of research on adolescence and emerging adulthood. When I became Editor in 2002, JAR did not have a distinct identity in the field of adolescence. It would have been difficult for anyone to say how it was different from the Journal of Research on Adolescence, the flagship journal of the Society for Research on Adolescence. So, recognizing the cultural narrowness of most research on adolescence, I declared from the outset that one of the primary goals of JAR would be to provide a venue for culturally diverse research (Arnett, 2005). The new Editor of JAR, Carola Suarez-Orozco, has admirably continued that tradition. She has also continued the other tradition I initiated, of encouraging (and publishing) submissions using a wide range of methods.
The Special Section: Expanding Research on Cultural Variations in Adolescence and Emerging Adulthood
The Special Section presented in this issue of JAR is comprised mostly of the last articles for which I served as Editor. Many of these articles serve as examples of the cultural approach to adolescence and emerging adulthood that I tried to promote as Editor. The first article is actually from my own research, a study of Danish emerging adults’ religious beliefs and moral views (Arnett & Jensen, 2015). The Editor for this article was Andrea Breen, one of the Associate Editors serving under Dr. Suarez-Orozco. The article shows how little religious beliefs matter to most young Danes in their daily life and in how they view morality. Yet, Denmark is one of the most contented, egalitarian, well-functioning societies in the world. In contrast to American research showing a positive relationship between religiosity and many favorable outcomes in adolescence and emerging adulthood, this study suggests that religion is not necessary for young people to thrive, in a society that provides them with other sources of support and opportunity.
The article on Polish views of adulthood, by Oleszkowicz and Misztela (2015), provides a number of insights into the rapid changes in Polish society since the fall of communism in 1990, and how those changes are influencing the lives of young people. For example, the proportion of 18- to 24-year-olds attending university rose from less than 10% in 1990 to 40% in 2012, an astonishing increase. Sampling young Poles from age 17 to 34, the authors found that young Poles tended to value some of the same criteria for adulthood as young people in other countries, such as accepting responsibility for one’s actions, making independent decisions, and financial independence, but also some that have been less prominent in other studies, such as being employed full-time and having a plan for the future. Thus, the findings add another slice of variation to the growing literature on cultural and national patterns in conceptions of adulthood.
The study presented by O’Driscoll, Heary, Hennessy, and McKeague (2015) took place in Ireland and investigated the ways that adolescents with mental health problems are excluded by peers. Using vignettes of adolescents with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or depression, they found that reasons for excluding peers with these problems centered on two themes, reciprocity and risk. That is, adolescents viewed peers with these problems as unable to reciprocate as in a normal friendship, and also believed that if they were friends with them, they would risk “emotional contagion,” and their social reputation might be negatively affected. Although the article did not explore the Irish cultural context as a foundation for these views, it raises the implicit question of whether these themes would be found among adolescents in other cultures as well.
The final article in the Special Section, on adolescents’ views of family leisure in Uganda, by McGovern and colleagues (2015), provides insights into adolescents’ lives in an African country. It also provides an example of successful collaboration between Western and non-Western researchers. Western researchers often have more resources for research, and non-Western researchers usually have the advantage of personal knowledge of the local cultural context. The combination can be fruitful, as it is here. In the rare studies of African adolescents published in psychology journals, the focus is often on problems such as disease or military conflict, so this study provides a refreshing and important perspective on normal family life. The findings provide many examples of the strength of family relationships in the lives of African adolescents, and how they value these relationships. It also provides another demonstration that, as noted above, the common American assumption that adolescents and their parents universally grow apart is quickly shown to be false when we extend research to other cultures. The adolescents in this study clearly prize their family relationships and are “fortified” by these relationships as they prepare to enter a challenging adult world.
Conclusion: Taking the Long View of the Cultural Approach
Although there is certainly more attention to cultural issues in psychology now than there was 50 years ago, that is not saying much, as we started from a baseline of almost nothing. Nevertheless, there are encouraging signs. Cultural psychology is by now a recognized field within psychology. Journals may be predominantly American, but they are growing more culturally open. For example, Child Development now requires attention to “sociocultural” context to be present as part of its published articles, a requirement that is hard to imagine even 20 years ago.
For those of us who favor the cultural approach to development in adolescence and emerging adulthood, the pace of growth in awareness of the importance of cultural context may be frustratingly slow. It may help to remind ourselves just how young psychology is, and how much younger still is research on adolescence and emerging adulthood. We are still at the beginning of a long-term enterprise of seeking to understand human development, and we still have time to get it right. I am confident that JAR will continue to be a leader in the pursuit of this goal.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.