Society for the Study of Human Development

The idea for the Society for the Study of Human Development (SSHD) arose in Sweden in May 1997, during a weeklong celebration and symposium in honor of the career achievements of David Magnusson, professor emeritus, Stockholm University. Richard M. Lerner (Bergstrom Chair in Applied Developmental Science, Tufts University) and Paul B. Baltes (director, Max Planck Institute for Human Development), along with the other conference participants, were traveling from Wyk's Castle to Stockholm, where both Professor Baltes and Professor Jerome Kagan (professor of psychology, Harvard University) would deliver, at the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences, back-to-back keynote addresses about the contributions of Professor Magnusson's work.

Both Baltes and Lerner reflected on how both the American and European participants at the conference shared with Magnusson an appreciation of the central importance of longitudinal life span research for the understanding of human development; of the theoretical significance for studying lives holistically, through focusing on the relations between the developing person and his or her ecology, including the person's embeddedness in ontogenetic, family (generational), and historical time; of the relative plasticity in human development, which derives from the dynamic character of the regulation of relations between person and context; and, as a consequence, of the implications for the application of developmental science, which derive from the plasticity across the life span of a person's change processes.

Baltes observed that despite what appeared to be an emerging consensus among developmental scientists about the theoretical and methodological primacy of these ideas, it was odd that American scholarly societies studying human development took age-specific approaches to the field (e.g., Society for Research in Child Development, Society for Research on Adolescence, or the Gerontological Society of [Page 1036]America). In addition, and in comparison to scholarly organizations outside of the United States that were devoted to the study of human development (e.g., the International Society for the Study of Behavioral Development), American scholarly societies did not stress the importance of the longitudinal analysis of the breadth of the human life course, were usually psychological in emphasis, provided little opportunity for the next generation of developmental scientists to be exposed to or trained in integrative theoretical and methodological approaches to the life span, and did not offer sufficient visibility to theoretically predicated ideas about the links between theory (for instance, regarding developmental regulation or plasticity) and applications to policies or programs.

As a consequence of this conversation, Lerner agreed that upon his return to the United States, he would talk with colleagues to learn whether they agreed that there was a need in the United States for a truly multidisciplinary scholarly society devoted to the integrative, longitudinal study of the life span, one that would provide a forum for developmental scientists to discuss theoretical ideas about life span processes of human development, hone their methodological knowledge and skills, and offer a context for the professional socialization of young colleagues and graduate students. Lerner contacted Dr. Jacquelyn James, associate director of the Murray Center for the Study of Lives at Radcliffe College (now the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University). The Murray Research Center is the world's major center for the study of lives through the analysis of archived longitudinal data and, as well, a key institutional contributor to the advancement of the theoretical, methodological, and training dimensions of the study of the human life course.

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