New perspectives on adolescent risk behavior
The past several decades have witnessed a remarkable invigoration of theoretical and empirical work on adolescent risk behaviors – behaviors that can, directly or indirectly, compromise the well-being, the health, and even the life course of young people. Knowledge about risk behavior has expanded almost geometrically in recent years, and it has become far more coherent and systematic than before. Today's conceptualizations encompass a wide array of causal domains, from culture and society on one side to biology and genetics on the other; they also convey, at the same time, a hard-earned awareness of complexity and a renewed respect for developmental processes.