ABSTRACT
The story of development, as Wohlwill (1973), McCall (1977), and others have noted, is the story of change. Whether the search for the laws that tell that story is made in the context of an organismic or behaviorist model, it is a search domi nated by the desire to discover the generic laws that account for the phenomena of development and those that tell us the rules by which change occurs. Developmentalists, by the very definition of their enterprise, focus on what changes and how the changes occur. By contrast, the study of individual differences involves looking for stabilities across time, stabilities that persist in the face of change, characteristics that endure as constants even as the rules governing change may vary over time. Perhaps that is why the traditional study of individual differences has been a largely “ adevelopmental” field, even though some attention has been given to interindividual variation and individual differences (e.g ., Baltes & Nesselroade, 1973).
