Summary ‘Adolescence and emerging
adulthood: A cultural approach’
Chapter 1 Introduction
Puberty: The changes in physiology, anatomy and physical functioning that develop a person
into a mature adult biologically and prepare the body for sexual reproduction.
Adolescence is more than the events and processes of puberty.
Adolescence: A period of the life course between the time puberty begins and the time adult
status is approached, when young people are in the process of preparing to take on the roles
and responsibilities of adulthood in their culture.
This textbook focuses on adolescence (10-18 yr) but also ‘looks ahead’ to young adulthood (18-25 yr).
Emerging adulthood: Period from roughly ages 18 to 25 in industrialized countries during
which young people become more independent from parents and explore various life
possibilities before making enduring commitments.
Adolescence in Western cultures: A brief history
Adolescence in Ancient Times (4th and 5th centuries BC): Aristotle and Plato both viewed adolescence
as the third distinct stage of life, after infancy (0-7) and childhood (7-14). Both of them viewed
adolescence as the stage of life in which the capacity for reason first developed.
Adolescence from early Christian times through the Middle Ages (circa AD 400):
- Augustine was a reckless young mean in his adolescence life. According to him, Christianity is
the key to the establishment of the rule of reason over passion here on earth.
- Many people of that era viewed adolescence as a time of innocence and saw that innocence
as possessing a special value and power (see Children’s Crusade).
Adolescence from 1500 to 1890: Beginning in 1500, young people in some European societies
typically took part in what historians term life-cycle service: a period in their late teens and 20s in
which they would engage in domestic service, farm service or apprenticeships in various trades and
crafts. Life-cycle service faded during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Young people left
their small towns in their late teens for growing cities. Result: young people became regarded as a
social problem in many aspects (rates of crime, premarital sex and alcohol use increased).
The age of Adolescence, 1890-1920: Three reasons why is marked as the ‘Age of Adolescence’:
1. The enactment of laws restricting child labor
2. New requirements for children to attend secondary school
3. The development of the field of adolescence as an area of research and study. Hall was one
of the imitators of the child study movement in the US. Some ideas of him are still verified,
but much of what he wrote is dated and obsolete. He based most of his ideas on the idea of
recapitulation: now-discredited theory which held that the development of each individual
recapitulates the evolutionary development of the human species as a whole. But one of
Hall’s idea is still debated today, the idea that adolescence is inherently a time of storm and
stress: theory asserting that adolescence is inevitably a time of mood disruptions, conflict
with parents and antisocial behavior.
Evidence nowadays supports a modified storm and stress view, but that does not mean that storm
and stress is typical of all adolescents in all places and times.
,Key terms
Culture: Culture is the total pattern of a group’s customs, beliefs, art and technology.
The West: The West usually refers to the majority culture in each of the countries (Europe,
the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand).
Industrialized countries: Countries with high developed economies that have passed through
a period of industrialization and are now based mainly on services and information.
Majority culture: Is the culture that sets most of the norms and standards and hold most of
the positions of political, economic, intellectual and media power.
Society: A society is a group of people who interact in the course of sharing a common
geographical area. Different from culture: Most of the times no shared common way of life.
Traditional culture: Refers to a culture that has maintained a way of life based on stable
traditions passed from one generation to the next.
Developing countries: Most previously traditional, preindustrial cultures are becoming
industrialized today as a consequence of globalization.
Socioeconomic status: also social class; includes educational level, income level and
occupational status.
Young people: is used as shorthand to refer to adolescence and emerging adults together.
Adolescence and emerging adulthood
When people referred to adolescents in the past history, they usually indicated that they meant not
just the early teen years but the late teens and into the 20s as well. In contrast, today’s academics
generally consider adolescence 10 to 18 years. What changed?
1. The decline that took place during the 20 th century in the typical age of the beginning of
puberty (first puberty begins at ages 13 to 15), now it begins at the age of 10.
2. Today’s academics see 18 as the end of adolescence: secondary schooling and further
education. Hall designated age 24 as the end of adolescence: marrying and getting children.
Five characteristics distinguish emerging adulthoods from other age periods. Emerging adulthood is:
1. The age of identity explorations: exploring various possibilities in love and work as they move
towards making enduring choices. They develop a more definite identity (who you are).
2. The age of instability: lives are unstable, think about moving out of their parents’ houses,
instability in education (dropping out of university), work and love relationships.
3. The self-focused age: a time in-between adolescents’ reliance on parents and adults’ long-
term commitments in love and work and during these years emerging adults focus on
themselves (they develop knowledge, skills and self-understanding).
4. The age of feeling in-between: not adolescent but not fully adult either.
5. The age of possibilities: many different futures remain possible, when little about a person’s
direction in life has been decided for certain.
Emerging adulthood doesn’t exist in all cultures. Cultures vary widely in the ages that young people
are expected to enter full adulthood and take on adult responsibilities. Emerging adulthood exists
only in cultures in which young people are allowed to postpone entering adult roles.
In this book, we will cover three periods: Early adolescence: from age 10 to 14, late adolescence:
from age 15 to 18 and emerging adolescence: from age 19 to about 25
The transition to adulthood
What marks the end of emerging adulthood?
- Legally, the transition to adulthood takes place in most respects at age 18.
, - Entering roles that are typically considered to be part of adulthood: full-time work, marriage
and parenthood.
- Criteria young people name: accepting responsibility for oneself, making independent
decisions and becoming financially independent. (All three are characterized by
individualism: Cultural belief system that emphasizes the desirability of independence, self-
sufficiency and self-expression. This often contrasted with the values of collectivism: A set of
beliefs asserting that it is important for persons to mute their individual desires in order to
contribute to the well-being and success of the group.)
Cultural variations:
- Some see completing military service as important for becoming an adult, others being able
to support a family financially, etc.
- In non-Western cultures, adulthood is clearly marked by marriage, they prize the collectivistic
value of interdependence, more than the individualistic value of interdependence. But: more
research is necessary.
The scientific study of adolescence and emerging adulthood
Scientific method: A systematic way of finding the answers to questions or problems that includes
standards of hypotheses, sampling and procedure, method, analysis and interpretation:
- Hypotheses: ideas, based on theory or previous research, that a researcher wishes to test in a
scientific study.
- Sampling: collecting data on a subset of the members of a group, that represents the
population they are interested in. The goal is to seek out a sample that will be representative
of the population of interest. If the sample is representative of the population, then the
findings from the sample will be generalizable to the population.
- Procedure: refers to the way the study is conducted and the data are collected. One standard
aspect of the procedure in scientific studies of human beings is informed consent: standard
procedure in social scientific studies that entails informing potential participants of what their
participation would involve, including any possible risks.
Two key issues with many methods are reliability: refers to the extent to which results of the measure
on one occasion are similar to results of the measure on a separate occasion and validity: the
truthfulness of a measure, that is, the extent to which it measures what it claims to measure.
Different methods used:
- Questionnaires: Questionnaires can have a closed-question format (most of the time) or an
open-ended question format.
o Advantage closed-question format: you can collect and analyze responses from a
large number of people in a relatively short time.
- Interviews: Interviews are intended to provide the kind of individuality and complexity that
questionnaires usually lack (qualitive research).
o Disadvantage: interview responses have to be coded according to some plan of
classification. This takes time, effort and money.
- Ethnographic research: researchers spend a considerable amount of time among the people
they wish to study, often by actually living among them. Anthropologists usually report the
results of their research in an ethnography: a book that presents an anthropologist’s
