Applied Developmental Science, Social Justice, and Socio-Political Well-Being

What Does Healthy Sex Look Like among Youth? Towards a Skills-Based Model for Promoting Adolescent Sexuality Development

“…Youth development programs focused on building youth advocacy skills can facilitate young people's efforts to optimize their own sexuality development as well as that of their peers and successors [Ginwright & James, 2002;Russell, 2002Russell, , 2005. Such optimization of human development is integral to the social justice mission of applied development science [Fisher, Busch-Rossnagel, Jopp, & Brown, 2012]. Thus, a focus on engaging youth directly in sexual advocacy has the potential to transform the societal structures that shape sexuality development in particular and adolescent development overall [Fine & McClelland, 2006;Tolman, Striepe, & Harmon, 2003].…”

Drivers of human development: How relationships and context shape learning and development1

“…An example of how racism affects the education-related aspects of the mesosystem is the problematic interactions between educators and families of color, which include an inability to identify, respect, and leverage family assets (e.g., Harry, Klingner, & Hart, 2005). Racism can be seen at the exosystem level through well-documented disparities in health care, mental health, housing, child welfare, educational resources, work opportunities, opportunities for civic participation, justice, and policing (e.g., Fisher, Busch-Rossnagel, Jopp, & Brown, 2012). Racism is present and institutionalized in macrosystems through policies and cultural forces that sustain or legitimize racial privilege (Pager & Shepherd, 2008).…”

Human Development, Theories of

“…These actions must necessarily be embedded in the ecologically valid settings of human development in order to have generalizability to the lived experiences of individuals and, therefore, must constitute intervention (applied) research and, at the same time, research testing basic explanatory processes of human development. As such, in contemporary developmental science, the commonly regarded split between basic and applied research is also regarded as a flawed holdover from earlier eras (Fisher et al, 2012;Lerner and Overton, 2008). In short, the application of developmental science (optimization) is a coequal partner with description and explanation within contemporary developmental science.…”

“…Although developmental science will only move asymptotically toward this knowledge base, current emphases in developmental science (Fisher et al, 2012) stress that scholarship should be directed to identifying the answers to questions about how to use integrated explanatory/ optimization work to create a more socially just world for diversity of individuals in our global community. This contemporary interest in the connection between basic and applied developmental science that serves social justice may portend a continued focus on an applied developmental science that contributes to social justice in future decades (Lerner, 2012).…”