Adolescents' Psychological Well-Being: A Multidimensional Measure

Over the last few years, different theoretical approaches have emerged advocating for a positive understanding of adolescence, recognizing it as a stage characterized by plasticity, the acquisition of competences and the achievement of satisfactory levels of well-being and positive adjustment. Based on Ryff's multidimensional model of psychological well-being, this study aims: (1) to develop an adjusted measuring instrument for adolescents (Brief Scale of Psychological Well-Being for Adolescents), as well as analysing its psychometric properties; and (2) to conduct a descriptive analysis of the levels of psychological and subjective well-being among adolescent boys and girls. A sample of 1590 Andalusian adolescents (51% girls), aged between 13 and 19 years old participated in this study. The Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) showed the validity of the instrument, with a multidimensional factorial solution of four factors (self-acceptance, positive interpersonal relationships, autonomy and life development) with good levels of internal consistency. Descriptive analyses showed good scores of psychological and subjective well-being among the adolescents, with a significant impact of sex and age in both measures of well-being. The results are discussed in terms of the importance of considering adolescent well-being from a multidimensional view and the need to promote positive development from a multifactorial perspective which takes into account the diversity of the variables involved.

Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) as an Emergent System: A Dynamic Systems Theory Perspective

This paper sets out to present a novel construal of one of the notions of Vygotskian cultural-historical theory viz., zone of proximal development (ZPD) drawing upon dynamic systems theory. The principal thesis maintains that ZDP is an emergent and dynamic system which is engendered by a dialectical concatenation of psychogenesic and sociogenesic facets of human development over time. It is reasoned that Vygotskian cultural-historical theory of human development, by invoking dialectical logic, has transcended Cartesian substance dualism and in turn has proffered a monistic and process-anchored ontology for emerging becoming of human consciousness. Likewise, it is contended that dynamic systems theory, having assumed fluent flux of reality with a capital R as its ontological axiom, entails a consilience of cognitive and contextual conceptual schemes to describe, explain, and optimize human development. The paper concludes by drawing some interpretive conclusions in regard to ZPD from dynamic systems theory perspective.

A Cluster-Randomized Trial of Restorative Practices: An Illustration to Spur High-Quality Research and Evaluation

Restorative Practices in schools lack rigorous evaluation studies. As an example of rigorous school-based research, this paper describes the first randomized control trial of restorative practices to date, the Study of Restorative Practices. It is a 5-year, cluster-randomized controlled trial (RCT) of the Restorative Practices Intervention (RPI) in 14 middle schools in Maine to assess whether RPI impacts both positive developmental outcomes and problem behaviors and whether the effects persist during the transition from middle to high school. The two-year RPI intervention began in the 2014-2015 school year. The study's rationale and theoretical concerns are discussed along with methodological concerns including teacher professional development. The theoretical rationale and description of the methods from this study may be useful to others conducting rigorous research and evaluation in this area.

Relationism and relational developmental systems: a paradigm for developmental science in the post-Cartesian era

This chapter argues that the Cartesian-split-mechanistic scientific paradigm that until recently functioned as the standard conceptual framework for subfields of developmental science (including inheritance, evolution, and organismic--prenatal, cognitive, emotional, motivational, sociocultural--development) has been progressively failing as a scientific research program. An alternative scientific paradigm composed of nested metatheories with relationism at the broadest level and relational developmental systems as a midrange metatheory is offered as a more progressive conceptual framework for developmental science. Termed broadly the relational developmental systems paradigm, this framework accounts for the findings that are anomalies for the old paradigm; accounts for the emergence of new findings; and points the way to future scientific productivity.

Embodiment and agency: toward a holistic synthesis for developmental science

Relational, systems-oriented approaches are strongly positioned to advance theory and research in developmental science and to cement a process orientation to development at all levels of organization--from the biological to the psychological and sociocultural--despite continued prominence in the field of biologically reductionist explanatory accounts. However, the inclusive, explanatorily pluralistic ontological framework involved in adopting a relational perspective on developing systems is not always fully appreciated, explicitly articulated or even followed by devotees of the perspective. In this chapter, we highlight the importance of holistically couching interlevel relations--those that obtain vertically between levels of organization, such as between the biological and psychological levels--in terms of wholes and parts and of recognizing the different modes of causal explanation that obtain depending on whether the relations move from parts-to-whole or whole-to-parts. This, in turn, yields an explanatory pluralism under which all living systems, at any level of organization, exist as both subjects and objects. We ground this discussion by examining the ontological compatibility with a relational developmental systems perspective of two systems-oriented approaches to embodiment: the dynamic systems approach of Thelen and Smith (1994, 2006) and the enactive approach of Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991).

The systems approach in developmental psychology: fundamental concepts and principles

Developmental Psychology seems to have come to an unifying theoretical framework which may make feasible to overcome the fragmentation so frequently referred to within the discipline. This is indicated by the widespread support being given to the systems approach, enriched by dialectic and contextual postulates. In this article, we briefly review the antecedents of this approach and explore its core concepts, indicating their roots and the precise way in which they are applied to developmental analyses today. We also examine the implications of the systems approach for developmental investigation, and its challenges.