Developmental Psychology and Life-Span Developmental Psychology. An Integration Attempt in Discussion

Abstract

During the last decade a new field of psychological inquiry has emerged: life-span developmental psychology. One of its main tenets is that man's development does not stop at adulthood but continues through out the life-span. This article discusses, first of all, whether it is appropriate to extrapolate the concept of development to the entire life cycle. Since it appears that development is equated to change throughout life, the conceptual basis of this new way of looking at the developmental framework is rather weak epistemologically. Nevertheless, a quite valuable the effort has been made by the life-span psychologists to disavowe the chronological age as the main variable (perhaps the independent variable) that guides the theories dealing with human development. Their appeal to the several systems of variables that contribute to explaining human development is also worth noting. The paper concludes with a discussion of the possibilities of integrating in one theoretical framework traditional developmental psychology and the new arrived life-spam developmental psychology.