ABSTRACT
This chapter examines some of the stable and contested views of adolescence expounded in contemporary sources. Research and theoretical literature into adolescence are fertile and prolific, but this hasn’t always been the case. Since the 1980s, specialist journals addressing all manner of aspects of the adolescent experience have emerged and have attracted prominent and gifted contributors. Jeffrey Arnett is a prominent American researcher who has focused attention on the distinction between adolescence and adulthood. The prominent approach in the more recent research has been to identify age bounds for the research but to avoid specifically labelling the participants as being adolescent. In the quest for qualitative markers, authors historically, and up to the early 2000s, have written of adolescence as agony, immaturity or incompleteness. In line with the deficit view of youth, the terms adolescence and adolescent have become common usage, accepted labels for people who, in one way or another, cannot be considered fully.
