Handbook of Child Psychology and Developmental Science, 7e V 4 - Ecological Settings and Processes

This authoritative reference spans the entire field of child development and, for the past 75 years, has set the standard against which all other scholarly references are compared. Updated and revised to reflect the new developments in the field, the seventh edition is sure to maintain its preeminence in the field of developmental psychology.The seventh continues and strengthens the trends towards specific theoretical analyses of multiple developmental processes, even highlighting this focus by including the term "processes" in each of the four volume's titles, a designation new to the "Handbook"'s history. The volumes present a rich mix of classic and contemporary theoretical perspectives, but the dominant views throughout are marked by an emphasis on the dynamic interplay of all developmental systems that interact across the life span, incorporating the range of biological, perceptual, cognitive, linguist, emotional, social, cultural, and ecological levels of analysis. At the same time, the chapters together consider a vast array of topics and problems, ranging from sexuality and religiosity to law, medicine, war, poverty, and education. The emerging world of digital experience is also given a fuller treatment than in any previous "Handbook" Edition, commensurate with our present-day technological revolution. All this gives this seventh edition of the "Handbook" a timely feel.The present "Handbook"'s combination of theoretical sophistication and topical timeliness resolves an old tension evident in the "Handbook"'s prior cycles, and rather than leaning in one direction or the other, this "Handbook" manages to be "both" more theoretical "and" more topical than the previous editions. As a developmental phenomenon, this puts the "Handbook" in a class of organisms that develop towards adaptive complexity rather than towards one or another contrasting polar dimension.