Adolescence and Beyond: Family Processes and Development

While the period of transition from adolescence to adulthood has become a recent focus for developmental psychologists and child mental health practitioners, the full role of the family during this period is only beginning to be explored. Many compelling questions, of interest to anyone involved in adolescence research, remain unanswered. To what extent do family experiences influence the way one navigates through emerging adulthood? How do we begin to understand the interplay between adolescents' contexts and their development and well-being?

Adolescence and Beyond: Family Processes and Development offers an accessible synthesis of research, theories, and perspectives on the family processes that contribute to development. Chapters from expert researchers cover a wide variety of topics surrounding the link between family processes and individual development, including adolescent romantic relationships, emotion regulation, resilience in contexts of risk, and socio-cultural and ethnic influences on development. Drawing on diverse research and methodological approaches that include direct family observations, interviews, and narrative analyses, this volume presents cutting-edge conceptual and empirical work on the key developmental tasks and challenges in the transition between adolescence and adulthood. Researchers, practitioners, and students in social, developmental, and clinical psychology--as well as those in social work, psychiatry, and pediatrics--will find this book an invaluable summary of important research on the link between family process and individual development.

Patricia Kerig, Ph.D. is a Professor and the Director of Clinical Training in the Department of Psychology at the University of Utah. Her research focuses on developmental psychopathology in the context of the family, and she is the author of a number of works concerning risk and resilience in children and adolescents exposed to family violence, interparental conflict, child maltreatment, and trauma.

Marc S. Schulz, Ph.D. is a Professor of Psychology and the Director of the Clinical Developmental Psychology Program at Bryn Mawr College. He directs the Bryn Mawr Emotion and Family Research Center, where he studies couple relationships, emotion processes and change across time in individuals and families. He is also a senior investigator for the Study of Adult Development, a 60-year old longitudinal study at Harvard University.

Stuart T. Hauser, MD, Ph.D. was a Professor of Psychiatry at Judge Baker Children's Center and Harvard Medical School.