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Grounded in Critical Youth Studies and English education scholarship that examines the consequences of conceptions of adolescence on English teachers’ thinking about pedagogy, this chapter highlights two ways English teacher educators can facilitate pre-service English teachers’ interrogation of dominant discourses of adolescence/ts so they might be better positioned to create pedagogical practices aligned with more comprehensive understandings of secondary students. The first focuses on teaching a Youth Lens in the context of a Young Adult Literature course, an approach that helps future teachers learn about adolescence as a construct and the linkages between this idea and English pedagogy. The second focuses on integrating youth into English teacher education coursework as guest speakers on a range of English and schooling practices whereby they are “re-positioned” as experts and contributors to English teacher education. Together, these points of intervention provide ways to re-position youth systemically throughout English teacher education programs.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of spiritual group training on improving the spiritual well-being (SWB) among adolescences. The SWB is one of the factors that determines adolescences’ positive behavior. A number of previous studies have supported that spirituality and juvenile delinquency were negatively correlated. The level of SWB is mostly influenced by the peers’ group interaction and the role of others in the environment.

The authors developed a Spiritual Group Training by utilizing a number of relevant literature. The authors constructed the training using the meaning of life, values of life, life goals, life connections, and relation to God. In order to yield empirical evidence, the authors performed a pre- and post-test experimental design. The study recruited 26 randomly selected students from five high schools. The authors adapted a 13-item SWB scale to measure the participants’ SWB.

The results showed that Spiritual Group Training significantly improved participants’ SWB (t=9.71, p<0.001). The results confirmed the study hypothesis that spiritual group training enhanced adolescences’ SWB.

Designing a proper intervention and evaluation was a challenging task for the authors. In this study, the authors evaluated the training by utilizing a simple pre- and post-test design. Future investigations should employ a different evaluation design.

Most studies support the notion that spirituality is negatively correlated with adolescence’s negative behavior. However, only a few, if any, investigations have focused on developing certain training focusing on SWB. This study contributed an important idea on the use of SWB to develop adolescence SWB.

Teenagers are typically described as impulsive and risk taking. Yet recent research shows that this observation does not hold in all contexts. Rather, adolescents show higher impulsivity and risk taking than children or adults in affective contexts. Motivational and affective processes are therefore of particular interest when trying to understand typical adolescent behavior. Additionally, pubertal hormones are hypothesized to play a special role in adolescents’ motivated decision making. However, evidence for the mechanisms underlying this relationship is sparse. In this chapter, we aim to integrate findings from human and animal studies in order to elucidate the specific impact of pubertal hormones on motivational processes in adolescence. Against this background, we critically discuss and reinterpret recent findings in psychology and neuroscience, speculate about underlying mechanisms, and suggest new approaches for future studies of adolescent behavior.

Sexual education in adolescence may represent the only formal sexual information individuals ever receive. It is unclear whether this early educational experience is sufficient to promote lifelong sexual health literacy. The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of the timing and source of sexual knowledge on current safe sex knowledge and risky sexual behaviours among middle-aged and older adults in the USA.

Participants (n=410, mean age=53.9, 50.7 per cent female) reported whether and when they received sexual knowledge from various sources. They were asked about their current safe sex knowledge and their lifetime sexual risk behaviours.

Most of the participants (61.5 per cent) received formal sexual education in adolescence and 20.2 per cent reported formal sexual education post-adolescence. Across the life span, friends were the most common source of sexual information. The sample scored in the upper mid-range on the scale indexing safe sex knowledge (M=6.69, SD=1.64, range=0-8). Participants reported engaging in an average of approximately four (out of 16) risky sexual behaviours across their lifetime. Those with formal sex education in adolescence scored significantly higher on safe sex knowledge. However, they also engaged in more risky sex behaviours.

This study is among the first to situate the normative, formal sexual education experience of adolescence within a life span context that not only accounts for time, but also multiple sources of influence. It would appear that there are more things to learn about the long-term influence of sexual education programmes during the formative years by studying adult sexual health and knowledge.

Depressive symptoms are higher among racial and ethnic minorities in the United States. Many studies have evidenced associations between school disconnectedness and depressive symptoms by race and ethnicity in adolescence (Joyce & Early, 2014; Walsemann, Bell, & Maitra, 2011). Given that adolescents spend most of their time at home when they are not at school (Larson & Richards, 2001), it is important to understand how mother-child relationships may moderate school disconnectedness, and how mother–child relationships may serve as a protective buffer for depressive symptoms in the transition to adulthood. I use data from Waves II and III of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) from 1995 to 2002 (n = 9,766) and OLS regression analysis to examine how school disconnectedness in adolescence is associated with depressive symptoms in the transition to adulthood, and how mother–child relationships in adolescence moderate these associations in the United States. I examine differences in these relationships across racial and ethnic groups. I find that school disconnectedness in adolescence is associated with increased depressive symptoms in the transition to adulthood, and that maternal warmth and communication moderates the association between school disconnectedness and depressive symptoms. Maternal relationship quality in adolescence serves as an important protective factor for mental health in the transition to adulthood.

This study aims at presenting the results of the research on the formative and permanent education in adolescence for health professionals of the Municipality of São Paulo. The analysis focuses on the so-called permanent education geared toward health professionals, and seeks to learn about the relation between biomedicine’s construction “of” adolescence and the problems related to teenagers’ health, deemed fundamental for the training of health professionals, from the study of themes related to teenagers’ health as they feature in the Permanent Education Municipal Plans (Planos Municipais de Educação Permanente – PLAMEP, covering the whole of the municipality). Thus the aim is to problematize the social construction, by biomedicine, of adolescence and of the adolescent body, grounded on the understanding of the issues raised in the PLAMEPs and defined as proper “to” adolescence and important for the permanent formation of health professionals. With a methodological approach of both quantitative and qualitative characters, the study holds as empirical reference the Municipal Health Schools of the Municipality of São Paulo and the six Regional Coordination Offices. The study relies, as research techniques, on documental survey (the PLAMEPs); on semi-structured interviews with managers, health representatives, and professionals to whom the activities of permanent education are aimed at; and on notes from the field book. The results now presented refer to the phase of PLAMEPs’ collection and analysis.

The objectives of the study were to explore the lived experiences of adolescents for understanding the process of their flourishing and develop a functional model to explain the dynamics of flourishing during adolescence.

Guided by the qualitative approach, the authors used interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to explore how various factors affect the process of flourishing during adolescence. The authors conducted in-depth interviews with 10 adolescents to collect qualitative data.

A total of eight boosters (four internal and four external) and seven barriers (five internal and two external) emerged. The results highlighted the importance of a functional model that explained the dynamics of adolescents' flourishing. Though the authors conceded that the presence of boosters and absence of barriers were instrumental in enhancing flourishing during adolescence, based on the extant literature, the authors assumed the existence and operation of other intra-individual and inter-individual factors or correlates.

First, the study participants are school-going adolescents living in a supported urban family environment where expectations to study and achieve are an important cultural component. Second, the study has focussed on the participants belonging to late adolescence—a transitional phase to emerging adulthood.

There are three implications of the study—theoretical (conceptualisation of a functional model), practical (construction of a new measure of flourishing) and clinical (designing intervention programmes to enhance positive living in adolescents).

The study has provided a deeper insight into adolescents' flourishing from insiders' perspectives using the framework of IPA and discovered and elaborated a functional model of adolescents' flourishing.

In the last 10 to 15 years, research studies have focused on the effects of differences across generations that result in differences in cultural expectations within the workplace (e.g. Arsenault, 2004). Different generations create shared attitudes to work and preferences for types of work which result in differences in their perception of, for instance, what makes a good leader or even the value of leadership within an organisation. While these generational differences are real, these analyses do not take into account differences that might result from the age, and therefore developmental stage, of the populations being assessed. The neuroscience literature clearly shows that there are maturational differences in the brain which are not complete until late teens to early 20s. It is therefore possible that some of the generational differences result from differences in processing ability resulting from structural immaturities in the brain. In particular, there are differences in the rate of maturation of areas of the brain related to reward sensitivity, threat sensitivity and regulation of behaviour which result in substantial differences in behaviour from adolescence through into adulthood. The purpose of this paper is to consider the effect of maturational changes in the brain on behaviours related to leadership and to outline ways in which these changes can be addressed in order to encourage young people to develop as leaders. This will include providing suitable experiences of leadership to encourage the faster development of the neural structures which underlie these capabilities.

Recent advances in neural imaging have resulted in a substantial increase in research investigating the development of the brain during adolescence. A literature review was conducted to find adolescent research that investigated decision making and risk taking. The data obtained were integrated and implications for leadership were drawn from an analysis of the resulting theoretical framework.

The research into decision-making processes in adolescents and younger adults points to a number of ways in which these differ from mature decision making. Younger people: (find it harder to inhibit behaviours) are more responsive to immediate reward; are more optimistic about the outcome of risky decisions; and are more responsive to social rewards (Jones et al., 2014). They also lack the experiences that adults use to distil the gist of a situation and therefore are more dependent on conscious, cost-benefit analysis of the outcome of decisions.

An understanding of the differences between adult and adolescent decision making points to the role of experience as a key factor in mature decision making. If adolescents are to make mature decisions, they have to be offered suitable challenges in safe environments from which they can gain expertise in leadership decision making. These can be designed to account for differences in sensitivity to reward and punishment in this group. In addition, young adults would benefit from learning the gist interpretations that have been extracted from situations by experienced leaders. This suggests that adolescents and adults would benefit from simulated leadership experiences and leadership mentoring.

The Baby Boomer generation who currently hold many of the leadership positions in organisations are coming close to requirement. They will have to be replaced by members of Generation X and the Millennial Generation resulting in potentially younger leaders. In addition, flatter organisational structures that are currently being implemented in many organisations will require leadership at many more levels. Thus, we need to be able to develop leadership skills in a more diverse and younger section of society. Understanding how the brain develops can help us to design appropriate leadership experiences and training for this upcoming generation of young leaders.

Recent advances in neuroscience of adolescence provide a unique opportunity to bring new evidence to bear on our understanding of decision making in young adults. This provides practical implications for how to develop leadership within this group and to support them as they gain experience in this domain. The evidence also points to a benefit for the increased risk taking seen in adolescence since this leads to greater motivation to try new, and potentially risky, ventures. Through a better understanding of the differences in decision making, we can both help adolescents to develop more mature decision making faster while benefitting from the optimism of youth.

The purpose of this paper is to focus specifically on the benefits of using mixed methods to investigate dietary change from adolescence to adulthood exemplified using the findings from the ASH30 longitudinal study. The ASH30 study is a longitudinal dietary survey which provided quantitative evidence of dietary change and investigated factors influencing dietary change from adolescence to adulthood.

Two three‐day food diaries were collected both in 1980 (aged 11‐12 years) and 2000 (aged 31‐32 years) from the same 198 respondents in North East England. In 2,000 questionnaires were used to collect perceptions of, and attributions for, dietary change and open‐ended responses were analysed using content analysis.

The use of mixed methods brings added breadth and depth to the research which cannot be achieved by a single discipline or method. Determining what has influenced change in dietary behaviour from adolescence to adulthood is a complex and multifaceted task. Eating habits are influenced by multiple factors throughout the life course. Change in food intake between adolescence and adulthood related to life‐course events and trajectories. The qualitative findings highlighted relevant contextual information such as themes of moral panics, the concept of “convenience” and “fresh” foods.

Adopting mixed method approaches to exploring dietary change should offer a rich perspective from which to base realistic interventions.

Longitudinal dietary surveys present an opportunity to understand the complex process of dietary change throughout the life course in terms both of how diets have changed but also of why they have changed.