Toward Enhancing the Role of Idiographic-Based Analyses in Describing, Explaining, and Optimizing the Study of Human Development

Abstract

The study of human development has evolved from a field dominated by reductionist approaches to a multidisciplinary scholarly domain that seeks to integrate variables related to biology, culture, and historical levels of organization across the life span into a synthetic, coactional system. Theoretical models derived from this paradigm emphasize such plasticity, and that development across life involves mutually influential relations in a dynamic system. Split conceptions are obviously eschewed in favor of a metatheory that emphasizes the study and integration of different levels of organization, including biology, physiology, culture, physical ecology, and history, as a means to understand human development over the life span. The alignment of the strengths of an individual young person and the strengths or developmental assets or resources of that person’s family is the essence of Lerner and Lerner’s Positive Youth Development model. The emphasis in the study of human behavior and development—whether of an individual or of groups—has been placed preponderantly on nomothetic attributes.