Introduction

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.

This invigoration and, indeed, transformation of work on adolescent risk behavior is obviously part of larger and more far-reaching trends in social inquiry as a whole, trends that, taken together, have been labeled “developmental science” (Cairns, Elder, & Costello, 1996) or, more narrowly, “developmental behavioral science” (Jessor, 1993). As an emerging paradigm, the trends refer to the multidisciplinary, multivariable, time-extended, process-focused, contextually situated, personcentered kinds of studies increasingly represented in contemporary social problem research. The chapters in this volume reflect, in one way or another, this newer orientation to inquiry, and risk behavior has been one of the arenas of social inquiry in which a developmental behavioral science approach has been most evident.

Most earlier work on adolescent risk behaviors was confined to a particular subset, often termed problem behaviors, that involved legal or normative transgression and that usually elicited social sanctions; traditionally, these included delinquency, drug use, alcohol abuse, and early sexual activity.