Priorities for research on adolescent development.

Research on the development of adolescents has made significant progress in the past 10-15 years, but is not yet fully mature. Future research must (a) deepen the recent work in understanding normal adolescent development, particularly among American youth from understudied racial and ethnic minority groups and through more longitudinal studies; (b) balance pressures to implement urgent preventive interventions for adolescents with the need for systematic evaluations that will lead to improvements in these approaches, including those that promote healthy patterns in all adolescents and target clusters of health-compromising behaviors rather than single ones; and (c) identify specific features of the range of settings in which adolescents participate that do or do not foster healthy development.