Major NY Times Piece on EA

Today's New York Times Sunday Magazine includes a huge article pertaining to emerging adulthood entitled, "What Is It About 20-Somethings?" For those who've already read extensively about young-adult development, the article probably won't offer much that is new, except perhaps for the details of Jeff Arnett's personal life growing up through the emerging-adulthood years. If you're new to the area of emerging adulthood, however, the article should provide a good introduction.

The article spends a good bit of time evaluating whether emerging adulthood qualifies as an official developmental stage of the lifespan. Like Arnett, I'm not so concerned about this. As a leading scholar said at a conference I attended in recent years, regardless of whether emerging adulthood is a stage, it does successfully describe what a large number of young people are going through.

Numerous areas are covered in the piece, from brain development, to public policies to aid young people toward full-fledged adulthood, to a profile of a unique (and expensive) mental-health treatment facility for young adults having difficulties, to a topic my students and I are starting to conduct research on, "helicopter parents."

My fellow transition-to-adulthood blogger Barbara Ray offers a provocative review of the article here. Ray critiques Arnett's conceptualization of emerging adulthood as being too focused on individuals' psychological "interior," too preoccupied with "how young adults perceive themselves as agents (or in this case as nonagents), and how they psychologically grapple with their identity and who they are/want to be," and concerned little, if at all, with social structural factors (e.g., the job market) that can greatly affect the life opportunities of young people.

The technical term for the studying the actor's subjective experience is phenomenology. It is the approach that I (along with Arnett and my Texas Tech colleague Malinda Colwell) used in designing the Inventory of the Dimensions of Emerging Adulthood (IDEA), a questionnaire to gauge how closely an individual's experiences match with the central themes of emerging adulthood. In creating a phenomenological measure, it was never my intent (and presumably not of my co-authors) to discourage or exclude structural factors from inquiry into young-adult development. We have compared college-attending youth and age-matched non-attenders on our questionnaire, for example, in an attempt to take into account more macro-level aspects of society (as it turned out, the two exhibited largely similar profiles on the IDEA).

Northwestern J-School Covers Emerging Adulthood

Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, as part of a national network known as News 21, has put together an online series that "examines the issues confronting the generation of young adults as they confront their futures in a diverse America. Issues include identity, lifestyle, career, community, social responsibility, dating/marriage and others." As seen in the following screen capture, the series appears to focus on approximately 20 metropolitan areas, about which the reader can obtain various demographic statistics. Shown below the map are some of the stories the school's writers have put together.

These stories range from the semi-humorous ("30 [Things to Do] Before 30") to more serious topics such as interfaith marriage. The project's focus on urban America (and on Chicago, in particular, given Northwestern's location) obviously doesn't represent the full diversity of the transition to adulthood. However, the variety of topics and of media (e.g., print, video) should appeal to readers interested in emerging adulthood.