A Research Agenda

Abstract

As a graduate student at the University of Chicago in the early 1970s it was personally comforting but professionally disheartening to realize the ease with which one could claim that he or she had read the major theoretical and empirical literature on adolescence. In the mid-1980s there are few, including myself, who would make this same claim because of the radical increase in volumes devoted to adolescence. Although I cease to be personally comforted, I am still professionally disheartened because the increased quantity of output has not been accompanied by a parallel increase in descriptive foundation research that is necessary for a field of study to evolve in a healthy, scientific manner. In this chapter I will review recent proposals for future research agendas for studying adolescence; all essentially ignore this point. In response to them, an alternate research agenda is proposed that argues for an ethological approach to the study of adolescence. This back-to-the-basics agenda is partially fulfilled by the remaining chapters of this manuscript.