The Cultural-Developmental Approach & Applications to Emerging Adulthood

This presentation will address how one-size-fits-all theories, which were highly popular in psychology in the 20th century, are often too rigid and too biased to adequately capture human development across diverse and changing cultures. An alternative is to conceptualize theories that are “cultural-developmental.” Dr. Jensen will describe what she means by a cultural-developmental approach, including presenting a cultural-developmental template theory of moral development. But a cultural-developmental approach may be applied to many other areas of human development. Dr. Arnett will describe how emerging adulthood represents a cultural-developmental understanding of the life course. Many countries are experiencing the demographic changes that have opened up the developmental space for emerging adulthood at ages 18 to 29, including longer education, erratic transition to employment, and later ages of marriage and parenthood. However, there are many different cultural paths through emerging adulthood, based on factors such as educational structure, acceptability (or not) of premarital sex and cohabitation, and the expectation (or not) of continued obligations to family.