ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we have two goals: (a) to suggest a set of psychological and social assets that are important for healthy development during adolescence and young adulthood and (b) to summarize the readily available indicators for these assets. We address the first goal in the first half of our chapter. We address the second goal in the last half of the chapter.
DEVELOPMENT DURING ADOLESCENCE AND YOUNG ADULTHOOD
There is general agreement that the adolescent years are critically important for the successful transition to adulthood. We have included the years from 18 to 25 as well because rapid demographic, sociocultural, and labor market changes have made these years as transitional as the teen years were in previous generations. As recently as the 1960s, the transition into adulthood in most Western industrialized countries (particularly in the United States and Canada) was well defined for most social class groups: adolescents finished high school and either went to college or into the labor market or the military. People generally married and began families in their early 20s. Thus, people were usually launched into adulthood by their early 20s, and there were only a limited number of fairly well-defined pathways from adolescence into
adulthood. This is no longer the case for many young people (Arnett, 2000; Corcoran & Matsudaira, 2005; Fussell & Furstenberg, 2005; Mortimer & Larson, 2002; Mouw, 2005; Osgood, Ruth, Eccles, Jacobs, & Barber, 2005). The median age for marriage and childbearing has moved up to the late 20s. Both the length of time and proportion of youth in some form of tertiary education have increased dramatically. Finally, the heterogeneity of passage through this period of life has exploded. There is no longer a small, easily understood set of patterns for the transition to adulthood, making the years between 18 and 25 as challenging a period of life as adolescence. In the United States, the level of challenge is especially high for noncollege youth and for members of several ethnic minority groups, particularly Blacks and Hispanics, for the following two reasons. First unlike many European and Asian industrialized countries, there is very little institutional support for the transition from secondary school to work in the United States, creating what the William T. Grant foundation (1988) labeled a “floundering” period in their important report: The Forgotten Half. Second, stereotypes about the competence of Blacks and Hispanics, coupled with lower levels of “soft skills” (Murnane & Levy, 1996) and the loss of employment options in many inner city communities (Wilson, 1997), have made employment of Black and Hispanic youth (particularly males) quite problematic (Corcoran & Matsudaira; 2005; Mollenkopf, Waters, Holdaway, & Kasinitz, 2005).
