Research Review
Concepts of Adolescence
It is my conviction that each life period has its sorrows and exhilarations for the
individual who experiences them as well as for those surrounding him and that
each period has its significance for the continuous development of the human
race. Youth is neither golden nor rotten. It has the potential of all human
experience.1
Tlris report reviews current research and programs concerned specifically with
young adolescents， approximately twelve through fifteen years old. Anyone who
has worked with this age group knows the arbitrariness of isolating such years
within a self-contained category. At the same time， it is precisely this arbitrari-
ness that must become one of the subjects of this report. The ages were chosen
because society， through institutions like junior high schools， sees the years from
twelve through fifteen as forming a coherent stage in life. Young adolescence is a
socially defined category， labeled as a \"stage\" and then neglected. It is the
central irony of this study that we are concentrating on an age group， limiting
our attention to it as much as possible， in order to help eliminate it as an
arbitrarily segregated age category within broader concepts of adolescence.
Friedenberg says that if a people have no word for something， either it does
not matter to them or it matters too much to talk about，a We have no name for
these adolescents who are neither \"preadolescants\" nor the \"youth\" writers
refer to when speaking about high school and college age people. They are
\"young\" or \"early\" adolescents. As such， they belong to that large amorphous
group we have so much trouble accounting for in our society: adolescents.
Our purpose in this section is not to provide new definitions of adolescence，
but rather to review concepts of adolescence that are currently informing
research. As a society we have no coherent concept of adolescence. The various
theories of adolescence with which scholars and practitioners deal all emphasize
similar features， like physical growth， sexual maturation， increasing autonomy，
increasing cognitive sophistication. Even so， biological， psychological， and
sociological concepts stand apart from one another because there is little
dialogue among the disciplines.
Biologically， adolescence spans the years between the onset of puberty and
the Completion of bone growth. Puberty is defined biologically as that phase of
bodily development during which the gonads secrete sex hormones in amounts
sufficient to cause accelerated growth and during which secondary sex character-
istics appear.3
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