SOCIALIZATION AND SELF DEVELOPMENT

INTRODUCTION
Adolescence is a crossroads from childhood to adulthood. Childhood experiences and
biological characteristics are transformed into interests, competencies, and self-beliefs
and begin to play an increasingly important role as the adolescent starts to make his or
her way toward adult life. This development is channeled by a variety of opportunities
and constraints in the adolescent’s social and institutional environments: Not all is possible,
but many things are. Out of these alternative pathways the adolescent has to select
the ones that appeal to him or her, or, in some cases, to significant others. Not
everything is attained, and surprises are part of the game. Therefore, ways to deal with
problems and unexpected events are developed. Along with these efforts and adventures,
adolescents begin to know themselves and to make reflections about who they
are. Young people are not alone in their efforts. Most of them live with their parents but
spend increasing amounts of time with their peers and friends. In these relations, advice
is given, interests raised, goals negotiated, solutions compared, and outcomes evaluated.
The aim of this chapter is to review what is currently known about the ways in
which adolescents make their ways into adulthood.
Adolescents face two broad challenges during the transition from childhood to adult
life: the entrance into production and reproduction fields of the culture and society. Entrance
into production includes becoming an economically independent individual who
is able to make his or her living in the society and economic system. This developmental
trajectory consists typically of a complex set of decisions concerning schooling, education,
and career. In turn, entrance into the reproduction domain includes a pattern of sequential
commitments to romantic relationships, building up intimate relations, founding
a family, and taking care of children. Although there is a lot of variation in how these
two broad challenges are approached, dealt with, and solved, these seem to be the key
challenges in all cultures and societies. The reasons for this are simple. When adolescents
85
The author would like to thank Kaisa Aunola, Terry Honess, and Katariina Salmela-Aro for their valuable
comments on the earlier versions of the manuscript and Rakel Nurmi, Maura Nurmi, and Katriina Aho-
Nurmi for secretarial assistance.
participate in these two processes, they become the agents in the reproduction of the society,
its economy, and its way of life (Nurmi, 1993). Moreover, working through these
two general challenges builds up a basis for the adolescent’s individuation from his or
her childhood family, as well as for his or her entrance into adult life and identity.
An increasing amount of research has been carried out on adolescence during the
past two decades. The majority of the studies has focused on examining adolescents’
behavioral characteristics, parental behaviors, or some other seemingly objective features
of adolescence. This research has provided important information about how
adolescents behave in many environments and about how this behavior changes with
age. Much less research has been carried out on how the adolescent’s mind works and
the kinds of consequences this adolescent psychology has for young people’s further
development. There are, however, a few relevant topics examined in the field of adolescent
research, such as self-concept, aspirations, coping, and identity. Some more recent
topics that are becoming popular in personality and social psychology are personal
goals, social strategies, problem solving, causal attributions, and identity narratives.
These topics have also begun to gain increasing attention in adolescent research.
In this chapter I review research on how adolescents’ minds work as they move to
adulthood, that is, what they think and feel about their lives as adolescents, what kinds
of interests they have, the kinds of tools they develop to deal with the challenges of adolescence,
and the ways in which they make stories about themselves later on. When reviewing
this research I used a few principles to make scientific generalizations of the
empirical research. The first principle is that before we make any generalization about
the findings, they should be replicated. Second, the source of the information on which
the results are based is considered. In some cases, such as parenting, information from
both parents and adolescents is a valid source of information. However, when the interest
is in a particular person’s thinking, such as the mother’s educational goals for
their child, the ways in which the adolescent perceives his or her mother’s goals is a secondary
type of information. Finally, the direction of influence is the key issue in developmental
psychology. However, it is difficult to deal with because experimental research
and intervention studies are rare. The major way to get evidence for the causality
in developmental processes is to use cross-lagged longitudinal data, which makes it possible
to control the previous level of the dependent variable before examining the later
impacts of the independent variables on the dependent variable.
A typical approach in review chapters such as this is to focus on one particular welldefined
research area and to exclude other topics. This approach may be problematic
for two reasons. The first is that researchers typically develop different kinds of conceptualizations
to deal with more or less the same phenomenon. Focusing on one conceptualization
only would mean, in fact, that not all important findings for a particular
phenomenon will be reviewed. Consequently, the aim of this chapter is to search for
the similarities across a variety of conceptualizations rather than to concentrate on analyzing
differences. Second, when focusing on one relatively narrow phenomenon and
a related research paradigm, there is a danger of losing sight of adolescent development
as a whole. In this chapter I make an effort to integrate research on adolescence under
a few umbrella concepts in order to provide a more holistic view of the young person.
In order to attain this goal, I first present a view in which adolescents’ socialization
is described in terms of four mechanisms: channeling, selection, adjustment, and re-
86 Socialization and Self-Development
flection. Then, research on a variety of more traditional concepts, such as futureorientation,
occupational aspirations, identity exploration, coping, causal attribution,
self-concept, and identity formation, are reviewed under these four headings. A few
topics, however, are excluded, such as academic motivation and achievement goals because
other chapters in this Handbook focus on them. The role of family and peers as
the interpersonal context for adolescent development is also considered. Finally, a few
future research directions and methodological issues are discussed.
CHANNELING, SELECTION, ADJUSTMENT, AND REFLECTION
During the adolescent years, an individual moves from being a member of the parents’
family to a full member of society. This development is characterized by four key mechanisms
(Figure 4.1): First, adolescents grow up in changing environments that channel
their developmental trajectories. A variety of sociocultural factors like cultural beliefs,
institutional structures, and historical events form such environments, which also
change rapidly from one age period to another (Nurmi, 1991). Such sociocultural and
institutional structures define an opportunity space for the adolescent that channels his
or her future-oriented motivation, thinking, and behavior. Second, as suggested by life
span theorists (Brandstädter, 1984; Lerner, 1983), adolescents are not passive targets of
environmental influences; rather, they select their developmental environments and future
life paths. Many psychological mechanisms are responsible for this selection: Motives,
interests, and personal goals direct adolescents’ exploration, planning, decision
making, and commitments and lead them to specific educational tracks, peers groups,
and leisure activities. Third, as a consequence of their efforts to select the direction of
their lives, adolescents end up having specific outcomes and receive feedback about
their successes and failures. Feedback about developmental outcomes, particularly
about failures and negative events, requires that young people adjust their goals, plans,
and thinking in order to cope successfully with the future challenges of their developmental
trajectories. Many psychological mechanisms, such as reconstruction of goals,
coping, and causal attributions, are responsible for this adjustment. Finally, after receiving
information about the outcomes of their efforts and ending up in a particular
life situation and social position, adolescents typically reflect about a variety of issues
concerning themselves and their lives: They construct conceptualizations about themselves
and tell stories to their parents and peers aimed at building up a coherent personal
identity