The present article responds to Males and Brown's "Teenagers' High Arrest Rates: Features of Young Age or Youth Poverty?" which claims that the widely observed pattern of crime rates peaking in late adolescence or early adulthood is an artifact of age differences in poverty. We note that the authors' interpretation of their aggregated…

The future of civil society in the world rests on the promotion of positive development and a commitment to positive and socially just community contributions by the young (Lerner, 2004). Adolescents represent, at any point in history, the generational cohort that must be prepared to assume the quality of leadership of self, family, community, and…

Many Internet safety and parenting experts suggest that parents prohibit their teens from social networking sites and other online spaces where predators may lurk. But we may do adolescents a disservice when we curtail their participation in these spaces, because the educational and psychosocial benefits of this type of communication can far…

Discusses contemporary theories of adolescence, stressing developmental systems models that integrate individual and contextual levels of analysis. Maintains that adolescence should be studied with multivariate-longitudinal designs, change-sensitive measures, and data analytic strategies capitalizing on triangulation across quantitative and…

Introduces the "person approach" to the study of adolescence, and discusses the consequences of the approach for theoretical thinking and research methodology. Reviews major types of pattern-based methods used for carrying out a person approach and discusses methodological challenges for adolescent research, including interindividual…