Preface" to Negotiating Adolescence in Times of Social Change

Child Development Perspectives, 2012

The radical political transformations of the 1990s in many countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, overlaid by effects of globalization and related economic crises, have had an effect on young people, particularly by changing contexts relevant for psychosocial development. According to research on major developmental tasks in adolescence, young people benefited from new freedoms, such as the open borders and advanced communication technologies, but they also faced new economic uncertainties concerning work and family for which they have tried to compensate by postponing traditional transitions to adulthood. Nevertheless, results show that the nature of the developmental tasks was not in jeopardy and that effects on development overall were moderate. This article reviews the research against the backdrop of a general model on how change at the macro level translates into individual adaptation in societies affected by the challenges of globalization, individualization, and demographic shifts.

Cambridge University Press eBooks, 1999

The Journal of Early Adolescence, 2013

The paper introduces a set of four studies focused on adolescents in the Czech Republic. In the first part, authors reflect on the cultural background, the political, social, and psychological factors that have had influence on several generations of adolescents in the period of the communist totalitarian regime. They also describe the social changes brought by the democratization of Czech society since the early 1990s. Second part of the paper reviews the life and changes in the behavior of Czech adolescents over the past 20 years. Based the findings of three studies representing three cohorts of adolescents (1992, 2001, 2010), it is argued that current Czech adolescents are becoming more like their Western peers. Compared with the 1990s adolescents, the current cohort is more realistic in their expectations, oriented more on achievement, social pleasure, and material values. Their relationship to formal authorities is weaker; especially, the relationships with parents and teachers are more liberal.

Journal of Social Issues, 2010

This article examines adolescents' perceptions of the economic changes and the justice of the new "social contract" in Eastern/Central Europe. Focusing on three countries, Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Czech Republic, it explores the social, political, and economic environments in which adolescents came of age in 1990. Surveys conducted among high school students in each country during 1995 tapped their perceptions of the economy, the local community, and their personal beliefs about the efficacy of individual initiative and hard work. Responses differed significantly based on age, gender, social class, value orientation, and country. Older adolescents and girls were more likely to observe that economic disparities were growing in their country and to be cynical about the value of hard work. Those with socialist values also discounted the value of recent changes. Adolescents in the Czech Republic were the least cynical about economic changes, whereas those in Bulgaria were the most cynical, with Hungarian youth the least optimistic about the future.

International journal of group tensions, 2000

This article is a selective literature review, viewing adolescence in a cross-cultural perspective. Starting with the Mead/Freeman controversy, it centers on the following question: Which are the cultural contexts that best ensure a smooth transition from childhood to adulthood? The review covers some of the ethnographic research, both case studies and work using the hologeistic method (those using the Human Relations Area Files), and some of the research in cross-cultural and developmental psychology, but neither cross-national comparisons nor studies with migrants in multicultural societies. It is found that social adolescence is a universal life stage, but that it takes very different forms in different societies. Its extension into a youth

1998

This article examines adolescents’ perceptions of the economic changes and the justice of the new "social contract" in Eastern/Central Europe. Focusing on three countries, Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Czech Republic, it explores the social, political, and economic environments in which adolescents came of age in 1990. Surveys conducted among high school students in each country during 1995 tapped their perceptions of the economy, the local community, and their personal beliefs about the efficacy of individual initiative and hard work. Responses differed significantly based on age, gender, social class, value orientation, and country. Older adolescents and girls were more likely to observe that economic disparities were growing in their country and to be cynical about the value of hard work. Those with socialist values also discounted the value of recent changes. Adolescents in the Czech Republic were the least cynical about economic changes, whereas those in Bulgaria were the most cynical, with Hungarian youth the least optimistic about the future.

New Directions for Youth Development, 2012

Youth development occurs in multiple contexts, which are affected by macro-level social processes that change opportunities and constraints for the attainment of various developmental tasks. In this paper, we review some of the transformations that central developmental contexts of adolescence undergo under conditions of recent global social and economic change. We then argue that interindividual differences in the way adolescents perceive and appraise such transformations are the key to understanding their effects on individual development. The relevant theoretical framework is provided by the Jena Model of Social Change and Human Development, which helps to trace the cascading effects of social and economic change from the macro- to the micro-level.

1993

This study was conducted to examine the timing of adolescent transitions. Its first aim was to investigate the hypothesis that cumulated family adversities during childhood would predict earlier transitions in domains such as behavioral autonomy and friendship formation during adolescence. Subjects (N1=1,631) were adolescents between the ages of 13 and 19 and their parents came from two different parts of the country, the former East and West Germany. This population allowed for the study's second aim, to compare effects of adversities across parts of the country that for decades were governed under different political systems. Six classes of risk factors were assessed, covering the time period before the age of 9 had been reached by the study adolescents: loss of a parent (due to divorce or death), serious illness (own or rerson close to self), residence change, school problems (failing a grade), unemployment of parent, and unskilled occupation of father (or mother in single-parent families). The timing of eight issues of normative psychosocial development was assessed in the areas of behavioral autonomy, opposite-sex friendship, and aspects of identity. The results revealed that, as hypothesized, groups high in cumulated adversities at the prepubertal stage showed earlier transitions to more adult behaviors in various normative issues of adolescent development. This was true for both regions of the country. The differences between adolescents low and high in adversities were more prevalent and pronounced among females, particularly those from the East. (Contains 6 figures and 10 references.) (NB)

The Sociological Review, 2003

This paper argues that the evidence from research among young people in postcommunist countries vindicates and should consolidate confidence in the Western sociology of youth's conventional transitions paradigm which seeks links between social origins, routes and destinations. Contrary to claims about postmodern fluidity, individualisation, and a blurring of traditional structural boundaries, the expected links between origins, routes and destinations have persisted throughout the transformation of the former communist countries. The relevant evidence also confirms the primacy of education-to-work and family/housing life stage transitions. Other aspects of young people's lives -their uses of leisure, levels and patterns of social and political participation, and socio-political attitudes, for examplebecome meaningful and explicable only when set in the context of the routes that individuals' lives have taken, and the stages that they have reached, vis-à-vis their school-to-work and family and housing transitions. The paper proceeds to argue that the exceptionally thorough changes that are still in process in East-Central Europe and the former USSR reveal with exceptional clarity the processes whereby young people's life chances are structured in ways that are not of the individuals' own making. It has been, and it remains, possible to observe how young adults learn from their own youth life stage transition experiences and, where applicable, use the assets that they acquire or retain, to advantage their own children thereby structuring the opportunities that confront all members of subsequent cohorts of young people. Finally, it is argued that the sociological approach being advocated is uniquely able to use the evidence from young people as a window through which to identify the impact of the ongoing macro-changes in former communist countries among different socio-demographic groups in the wider populations.