ABSTRACT
When we convened a focus group of psychology students to seek their opinions about what they would like to see in a book such as this, one member said that learning developmental psychology was like going into a dark room with a torch (flashlight, for our US readers) – one only ever sees bits and pieces and cannot put the whole picture together. He hoped that a book of this sort might be able to act like a switch to illuminate the whole room.While it would be overambitious to claim that we have achieved this, we do see the present chapter as a particularly important one since it addresses recent attempts to provide more integrative approaches to understanding child and adolescent development. Theoretical approaches with claims to holism include family therapy theories, biopsychosocial theories (especially bioecological theory), dynamic systems theory and evolutionary developmental psychology. We have also provided a reminder about general systems theory as it has provided the theoretical basis for numbers of these approaches. We also consider whether a rapprochement between positivism and postmodernism is possible.
