ABSTRACT
Daniel’s contrast of Adult students’ independence and Young Adult students’ social needs has been made before; it is part of what is already known about changes occurring in people as they mature. And it is true that what is already known can be a good guide to what is to be learned. Developmental issues, the topic of this chapter, play the role of the already known material, and we present them here as a guide to understanding what we have learned in our study —the material in the chapters to follow. We will use developmental issues as a way of both identifying similarities among and differences between our Young Adults and Adults, and as a way of understanding the patterns in the answers to questions we report later. It is a mistake to think of adult development as simply the progression of a person from one stage to the next. There is a progression, of course, but it occurs for each individual against the background of the environment within which that individual lives. Interestingly, recognizing the progression-and then appreciating its importance in the lives of adults-is a recent phenomenon. As Knox (1977) observes:
In earlier eras, attention to human growth and development was focused on childhood and adolescence, and adulthood was considered a period of stability. Rapid social change, pluralistic and egalitarian values, and an aging population have shifted our attention to the dynamics of the process by which adult life unfolds.
