ABSTRACT

Psychologists consider the period between 18 and 25 years of age as a time when young people prepare for adulthood. In Western societies, this traditionally has meant becoming socially and financially independent. Until the early 1980s, studies of this age group were monopolized by psychological, medical and psychiatric approaches that associated problem-behaviour and crisis with inability – or lack of desire – to take on tasks required by society. The notion that crisis was a critical part of this age helped to create images of disturbance and problematic behaviour that the public came to view as the ‘problems of adolescence’ (du Bois-Reymond et al. 1995).