ABSTRACT
The 30th Minnesota Symposium on Child Psychology honored the distinguished career and contributions of Willard W.Hartup. Like Hartup, the contributors to this volume are pursuing a new direction in the study of social development. Although social development traditionally has been defined as “changes over time in the child’s understanding of, attitudes toward, and actions with others” (Hartup, 1991), the field largely has been the study of the individual child. The “others” in this definition have been shadowy figures, at best, in the data from which widely accepted tenets of social development have been inferred.
