Routledge Lifespan Developmental Systems: Meta-theory, Methodology and the Study of Applied Problems

Everything you always wanted to know about theories, meta-theories, methods, and interventions but didn’t realize you needed to ask. This innovative textbook takes advanced undergraduate and graduate students "behind the curtain" of standard developmental science, so they can begin to appreciate the generative value and methodological challenges of a lifespan developmental systems perspective. It envisions applied developmental science as focused on ways to use knowledge about human development to help solve societal problems in real-life contexts, and considers applied developmental research to be purpose driven, field based, community engaged, and oriented toward efforts to optimize development. Based on the authors’ more than 25 years of teaching, this text is designed to help researchers and their students intentionally create a cooperative learning community, full of arguments, doubts, and insights, that can facilitate their own internal paradigm shifts, one student at a time. With the aid of extensive online supplementary materials, students of developmental psychology as well as students in other psychological subdisciplines (such as industrial-organizational, social, and community psychology) and applied professions that rely on developmental training (such as education, social work, counseling, nursing, health care, and business) will find this to be an invaluable guidebook and toolbox for conceptualizing and studying applied problems from a lifespan developmental systems perspective. Review Developmental science has moved irrevocably away from reductionist and mechanist conceptions and embraced dynamic, relational developmental systems models and methods as cutting-edge means to describe, explain, and optimize development across life. Professors Skinner, Kindermann, and Mashburn have written a singularly timely, important, creative and masterful work that provides a compelling roadmap for traversing from the developmental science of the past to its dynamic systems present and future. Their book should be required reading for developmental scientists and students seeking to understand and to enhance the life-span development of the diverse people of our world. Richard M. Lerner, Bergstrom Chair in Applied Developmental Science and Director, Institute for Applied Research in Youth Development, Tufts University This is a superb contribution to the lifespan literature. I believe that my late friend and colleague, Paul Baltes, would also be proud of the volume for a number of reasons. Paul played a direct role in the training of the authors and he took his teaching responsibilities very seriously. The authors have captured "basic Baltes" and brought it into developmental systems science with understanding, panache, and no small amount of humor. The authors’ metaphorical journey extends the notion of a trajectory; a concept often invoked by Baltes and other lifespan scientists. Appropriate for both advanced undergraduates and graduate students, this text will be instrumental in realizing the hopes early generation lifespan developmental scientists held for the advances to come from later generations. John R. Nesselroade, Hugh Scott Hamilton Professor of Psychology Emeritus, University of Virginia In this incisive advanced textbook, Skinner, Kindermann, and Mashburn systematically articulate and evaluate the deep-seated assumptions behind theory and method in developmental science. They not only map out, in cogent and clear-cut fashion, the metatheoretical and metamethodological landscape of developmental science, but they do so without ever losing sight of the nuanced complexity that characterizes such terrain. With humor and cutting edge sensibilities, their textbook provides a treasure trove of insights and pedagogical resources perfectly suited to fostering substantive, critical thinking about what it means to adopt a truly developmental perspective. David C. Witherington, University of Ne