Youniss, James

James Youniss, “Jim” to his large circle of friends and colleagues, was born in Green Bay, Wisconsin, where he acquired his lifelong attachment to the Green Bay Packers, his hometown's professional football team. After receiving a BA from Marquette University in 1959 and an MA from Hollins College in 1960, Jim moved to Catholic University, where he has spent his entire career as a graduate student and faculty member (PhD, 1962).

Youniss's contributions to applied developmental science can be traced historically through a succession of four phases. The first of these featured experimental studies of cognition in deaf children. In collaboration with Hans Furth, his colleague and friend at Catholic University, Youniss conducted a series of studies examining reasoning in deaf and hearing children. Their findings on reversal performance, discrimination shifts, concept transfers, and logical reasoning appeared in Child Development, Journal of Experimental Psychology, Journal of Consulting Psychology, and many others (e.g., Youniss, 1964). One contribution of these articles was to direct the attention of researchers to the challenges faced by hearingimpaired children, a population typically ignored by developmental psychologists in the 1960s. It is fair to say that Youniss and Furth helped lead the field toward the study of atypical populations.

The study of deaf children was also important for Youniss's intellectual development, as he and Furth turned to the work of Piaget to understand the [Page 1158]developmental patterns they were observing. Contrary to the suppositions of many theorists of the time, Youniss and Furth found that deaf children's abilities to reason about the physical world were comparable to those in hearing children. The Piagetian tradition was helpful in explaining this set of findings, because it allowed for the construction of thought through action, a process that could occur in the absence of speech and language. For approximately a decade, during the second phase of Youniss's work (e.g., Youniss & Furth, 1966), Piagetian theory oriented Furth and Youniss's research on reasoning in children and adolescents. This phase was highlighted by Piaget's visit to Catholic University in 1970, during which he was awarded an honorary degree.

The third phase of Youniss's career in applied developmental science began at the overlap of the conclusion of a decade of exploration of Piaget's theory with a year spent in Latin America. Youniss was increasingly drawn to Piaget's account of the role of social interactions, relationships, and institutions in the construction of all forms of knowledge. The idea that knowledge is socially constructed, as opposed to being formed through individual activity or transmitted by adults to children, fit well with Youniss's research findings and experiences with deaf children.

Youniss's growing appreciation of the importance of the social construction of knowledge was deepened by his year of research in Mexico, Guatemala, and Peru. The contrasts of these countries with the United States as contexts for development cemented Youniss's focus on social forces on children's development, a focus that continues today.

Three major publications staked out Youniss's theoretical and empirical territory during this era. The first of these was a chapter for the 1975 Minnesota Symposium on Child Development (Youniss, 1975), in which Youniss outlined his initial ideas concerning the synthesis of social relations with cognitive development. The theoretical ideas received their full development in Youniss's book Parents and Peers in Social Development (Youniss, 1980). This book was both quirky and enormously influential. The quirkiness is in Youniss's extremely thorough explication of Piaget's and Harry Stack Sullivan's ideas concerning the developmental influences of adults and peers. Piaget and Sullivan are quoted extensively throughout. None of the well-known theorists of the time—Piaget, Kohlberg, Bandura, Gilligan—wrote books that offered genuine syntheses of theoretical ideas from divergent traditions, and many readers were struck by Youniss's comprehensive analysis of Piaget's and Sullivan's ideas.

...