RELATIVE PLASTICITY, INTEGRATION, TEMPORALITY, AND DIVERSITY IN HUMAN-DEVELOPMENT - A DEVELOPMENTAL CONTEXTUAL PERSPECTIVE ABOUT THEORY, PROCESS, AND METHOD

Current research about adolescent development often is associated with ideas stressing that dynamic individual-context relations provide the bases of behavior and developmental change. The power of these ideas is constituted by 4 assumptive components of contemporary developmenta l theories: systematic change and relative plasticity; relationism and integration; embeddedness and temporality; and generalizability limit s, diversity, and individual differences. A program of research adequa te to address these ideas must involve longitudinal designs and divers ity- and change-sensitive measures, multiple methods to appraise varia bles at multiple levels, and multiple cohorts to assess temporal chang e. Such theory-guided research may legitimate the possibility of enact ing policies and programs to promote positive developmental trajectori es in children and adolescents and thus capitalize on the human potent ial for plasticity.