Online Vol. 01.2008 

Rethinking Adolescence in Spiritual Terms

Study Assesses Link Between Youth Development and Belief

By Frank Brown

A little over a century ago, American psychologist G. Stanley Hall came up with a new way to classify and understand adolescence. He identified three components of the second decade of life: moodiness, conflict with parents and risk-taking behavior. Hall's negative notion of adolescence persists today, with parents bracing themselves for the onset of teen years and society generally wary of the age group.

Tufts University psychologist Richard Lerner is part of a growing number of scholars, researchers and educators working to change that perception, to emphasize adolescents' capacity for beneficial growth.

Lerner has long studied the interplay between adolescents and their peers, families and communities. Now, with a three-year, $1.5-million grant from the John Templeton Foundation, Lerner is carving out a research niche for himself with a project entitled, "The Role of Spiritual Development in Growth of Purpose, Generosity, and Psychological Health in Adolescence."

"We are the first lab to put these together. In fact, a few years ago I was at a conference in Germany and there was great skepticism among the European social and behavioral scientists that this could be done," says Lerner.

The pilot study consists of seven research modules that used youth samples to, for example, gauge a possible correlation between civic-minded teens and their spirituality, and conduct a brain imaging study on college-aged participants. Another survey focused on youth in religious schools or programs and asked them to define different aspects of spirituality.

"One thing that Rich (Lerner) is excellent at doing is understanding the connection between a young person and their world – whether it is their spiritual world or the global world – and to look at how young people are motivated or fueled to give back to their community," comments Dr. Pamela Ebstyne King, a member of the study's Scientific Advisory Board and an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA) who is on the research faculty of Fuller Theological Seminary's Graduate School of Psychology.

The results will be discussed at the Second Conference on Positive Youth Development and Spirituality, to be held in mid-April at Tufts University. Lerner plans for the conference also to serve as a springboard for a national longitudinal study on the subject that would begin in 2009.

According to Lerner's colleagues, there are challenges inherent in working in the positive youth development field as a whole because, traditionally, decision makers tend to focus on curbing negative behaviors - such as teen pregnancy, gang activity and violence – rather than encouraging the beneficial.

"In terms of public policy and media it is a challenge. Our media and public policy makers tend to be responsive to crisis," says Gene Roehlkepartain, co-director of the Minneapolis-based Search Institute's Center for Spiritual Development in Childhood and Adolescence. "Getting people to respond to anything that is not a crisis is always a trick."

Lerner's books, though, are one remedy to coaxing the media, policy makers and the general public into adopting a different point of view. His most recent, The Good Teen: Rescuing Adolescence from the Myths of the Storm and Stress Years published in 2007, garnered interviews on the "Good Morning America" television program and an article in "USA Today." Additionally, the Templeton Foundation Press is slated to publish this year the first edited book of Lerner's project, Positive Youth Development and Spirituality: From Theory to Research.

Academics and researchers in the field of developmental psychology historically have been reluctant to tackle questions of spirituality. That is true even though early pioneers in psychology, such as William James, ranked religious expression as one of the most fertile areas for study.

"It's been seen as too ephemeral. It is a lot easier to study how children learn how to walk than to study people's intuitions," says William Damon, a professor of education at Stanford University, where he is also director of the Center on Adolescence. "It hasn't ever been in the forefront of research in the field."

Next year Lerner plans to launch a larger study of spirituality and youth that will track development over the course of years. It is a realm that he is passionately curious about. "There must be something in a young person that causes them to move in a positive direction," Lerner says. "My hypothesis is that this is what we call spirituality. This is the fuel that allows them to be generous, to think beyond the self."

Frank Brown is a writer based in New Haven, CT.

For more information about the Institute for Applied Research in Youth Development please go to:
http://ase.tufts.edu/iaryd/

Marby Sparkman, Editor
milestoneseditor@templeton.org

Pamela Thompson, Vice President of Communications
pthompson@templeton.org

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