Developing in a Dynamic World

Abstract

Abstract. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic and other social dynamics created a myriad of challenges and changes for individuals, groups, and societies. The impacts on youth are particularly noteworthy given developmental processes of adolescence and emerging adulthood. As psychologists, we have much to offer in studying how 2020 influenced their development and in shaping effective supports. To be useful, the work must be nuanced, iterative, and attentive to their lived realities. We argue for a dynamic research framework to study these developmental processes. Through such an approach, psychological science can provide insight into diverse young people’s experiences of COVID-19 with a focus on addressing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 3, 4, and 16 on increasing a sense of well-being, making education more equitable, and developing more peaceful societies. This paper lays out three theoretical frameworks – Synthetic, Augmentative, Generative, and Experiential, Meanings, Observations, Viewpoints, and Experiences, and the Developmental Peacebuilding Model – that can be used to capture the dynamism of meaning-making and development within changing contexts. We then provide examples from our research with young people in the United States and Ireland. This paper ends with a call for psychologists across the globe to understand and address COVID-19’s impacts on youth through iterative and integrative research methods with a focus on meaning-making. In coordination with macro-level metrics, such work can help understand lived psychosocial impacts on diverse groups of young people, while highlighting opportunities to support SDGs 3, 4, and 16.Impact and Implications.Building peaceful, inclusive societies with equitable educational opportunities requires attention to how young people process, make sense, respond to, and shape what is going on around them. The events of 2020 – the pandemic, racial injustice, and financial and health crises – have impacted the lives of youth during a critical time in their development that will influence how they engage with their communities, as well as their well-being, educational trajectories, and orientations toward peace. In this paper, we describe how dynamic and iterative research on interpretation and meaning can provide insights into how young people are experiencing and responding to these events, with implications for advancing the Sustainable Development Goals.