A

ABORTION

See Family Planning; Pregnancy and Pregnancy
Termination.

ACCULTURATION

See Ethnicity.

ADDICTION

See Alcohol; Drug Abuse.

ADOLESCENCE

Recognition of the life stage between childhood
and adulthood as a subject of modern scientific
inquiry began in the early twentieth century with
the publication of Antonio Marro’s La Puberta
(1898) and G. Stanley Hall’s highly influential
compendium Adolescence (1904). Although Hall’s
book represented an initial effort to describe ado-
lescence, it nevertheless resonated with themes
already familiar among scholars and the public. In
Europe, romantic conceptions of a sexually charged,
troubled youth (e.g., in Rousseau’s Émile) circulat-
ed among the socially concerned. In America, an
established tradition of cautionary literature em-
phasized the impressionable nature of young peo-
ple and their vulnerability to sin (e.g., in the essays
and sermons of Cotton Mather). Hall incorporat-
ed many of these ideas into a Darwinian frame-
work to conjure an ‘‘adolescence’’ recognizable to

his readers (Ross 1972). Although the work is

viewed as a curious and difficult amalgam today, it

nevertheless emphasized themes that continue to

shape the study of youth.

Hall viewed adolescence through the lens of

Ernst Haeckel’s biogenetic principle, which holds

that the human life span recapitulates the phases

of human biological and social evolution (Gould

1977). Hall maintained that late childhood corre-

sponds to a period of peaceful savagery in the

distant past, whereas adolescence represents a

‘‘neo-atavistic’’ period of migration into a chal-

lenging environment, which prompted physical,

social, and psychological conflict and growth. This

characterization of the adolescent, as troubled by

all-encompassing turmoil, was contested early in

the twentieth century by prominent behavioral

scientists such as Edwin Thorndike (1917) and has

been repeatedly challenged since then, perhaps

most famously by Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age

in Samoa (1928) (but see Freeman 1983; Côté

1994). Likewise, sociologists such as Robert and

Helen Lynd (1929) and August Hollingshead (1949)

found little evidence of pervasive trouble among

the youth of Middletown or Elmtown. Contempo-

rary behavioral scientists take a more moderate

view than Hall’s, depicting adolescence as a time of

both change and continuity (e.g., Douvan and

Adelson 1966). Nevertheless, the study of adoles-

cence has been indelibly marked by the ‘‘storm

and stress’’ motif.

Hall also maintained that adolescents are highly

responsive to adult guidance. Drawing on work by