ABSTRACT
The transition from childhood to adulthood is a neglected topic in economic psychology. In much of this chapter, therefore, we shall be pulling together research from the parent disciplines and trying to make sense out of it from our own perspective. Furthermore, one of the parent disciplines, psychology, has also tended to neglect adolescents and young adults (except for the ubiquitous university student used as an experimental participant-but in these cases the person’s life stage is rarely in the researcher’s mind). On the old definition of developmental psychology as, essentially, child psychology, adolescence was the last and perhaps the least interesting stage of childhood, when children were perhaps least mysterious, least unlike adults. On the newer conception of development as a life-span process, it is again less interesting as being more like childhood than other adult phases. To an economic psychologist, however, the period of adolescence and young adulthood is critically interesting. Fortunately, to offset the neglect of adolescence by psychologists, there is a rich literature in sociological and educational research. Educationalists’ interest is driven partly by the fact that in adolescence, for the first time in their lives, people become voluntary rather than conscripted participants in the educational process, so like other customers, their convenience has to be studied rather than taken for granted. As far as sociologists are concerned, the concept of transition is at the heart of much sociological theory, and the transition from child to adult is one of the most significant in any person’s life.
