Research Review<br >Concepts of Adolescence<br >It is my conviction that each life period has its sorrows and exhilarations for the<br >individual who experiences them as well as for those surrounding him and that<br >each period has its significance for the continuous development of the human<br >race. Youth is neither golden nor rotten. It has the potential of all human<br >experience.1<br >Tlris report reviews current research and programs concerned specifically with<br >young adolescents， approximately twelve through fifteen years old. Anyone who<br >has worked with this age group knows the arbitrariness of isolating such years<br >within a self-contained category. At the same time， it is precisely this arbitrari-<br >ness that must become one of the subjects of this report. The ages were chosen<br >because society， through institutions like junior high schools， sees the years from<br >twelve through fifteen as forming a coherent stage in life. Young adolescence is a<br >socially defined category， labeled as a "stage" and then neglected. It is the<br >central irony of this study that we are concentrating on an age group， limiting<br >our attention to it as much as possible， in order to help eliminate it as an<br >arbitrarily segregated age category within broader concepts of adolescence.<br > Friedenberg says that if a people have no word for something， either it does<br >not matter to them or it matters too much to talk about，a We have no name for<br >these adolescents who are neither "preadolescants" nor the "youth" writers<br >refer to when speaking about high school and college age people. They are<br >"young" or "early" adolescents. As such， they belong to that large amorphous<br >group we have so much trouble accounting for in our society: adolescents.<br > Our purpose in this section is not to provide new definitions of adolescence，<br >but rather to review concepts of adolescence that are currently informing<br >research. As a society we have no coherent concept of adolescence. The various<br >theories of adolescence with which scholars and practitioners deal all emphasize<br >similar features， like physical growth， sexual maturation， increasing autonomy，<br >increasing cognitive sophistication. Even so， biological， psychological， and<br >sociological concepts stand apart from one another because there is little<br >dialogue among the disciplines.<br > Biologically， adolescence spans the years between the onset of puberty and<br >the Completion of bone growth. Puberty is defined biologically as that phase of<br >bodily development during which the gonads secrete sex hormones in amounts<br >sufficient to cause accelerated growth and during which secondary sex character-<br >istics appear.3<br >