Life‐Span Development

Abstract

A conceptual exploration of the nature of life-span development is presented. It is argued that meanings and methods of “Life Span Development” are contextualized by broad metatheoretical groundings. Split metatheoretical groundings cut the nature of development into sets of dualistic competing alternatives. On the other hand, a relational metatheoretical grounding provides an integrative perspective on development and developmental issues. Relationism—a synthesis of the metatheoretical worldviews contextualism and organicism—conceptualizes development as a holistic, self-organizing/self-regulating system; a relational developmental system in which variational and transformational change, continuity and novelty, biology and culture, structure and function, constructivism and information processing operate as integrative, interpenetrating/coactive components. From split approaches, forces external to the psychological organism—environmental or biological—drive psychological development. Within a relational developmental systems approach, the self-organizing system's actions-in-the-world constitutes the overriding micro-mechanism of development, whereas biology and culture constitute system resources. Split perspectives faced with life-span issues of growth and decline find resolution by assuming competing alternative processes: one “developmental,” one “aging.” Relational developmental systems resolve the same issues through a dual-trajectory understanding of a single overarching process called development.