Romantic Relationships and Sexuality in Adolescence and Young Adulthood ― The Role of Parents, Peers and Partners

Romantic relationship formation and the engagement in sexual behaviors are normative and salient developmental tasks for adolescents and young adults. These developmental tasks are increasingly viewed from an ecological perspective, thus as strongly embedded in different social contexts. This volume brings together seven recent empirical studies that investigated different aspects of adolescents’ and young adults’ romantic relationships and sexuality, and the linkages with various characteristics of relations with parents, peers, and partners. These studies were conducted in six Western countries, including Australia, Belgium, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, and the USA. Three studies examined the formation of young people’s romantic relationships, and the other four studies focused on youth’s developing sexuality. Together, they employed a diverse range of state-of-the-art research methods, including online questionnaires, computer-assisted interviews, daily diary assessments, and observations of dyadic interactions. In the editorial chapter, these recent advances in empirical research are discussed and framed within two important changes in the theoretical perspectives on young people’s emerging romantic relationships and sexual activity: from risky behaviors to normative tasks, and from individual to contextualized processes. Throughout this volume, important directions for future research are suggested, specifically focusing on how to better incorporate the interrelational perspective into empirical research on these topics, and how to further bridge the gap between the research fields on romantic relationships and sexuality.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Journal of Developmental Psychology.

Daphne van de Bongardt is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Research Institute of Child Development and Education (YIELD) of the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. She studies the development of romantic relationships and sexuality of adolescents and young adults in different social contexts (e.g., families, peer relations, schools, media, festivals).

Rongqin Yu is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Psychiatry of the University of Oxford, UK. She investigates links between mental illness and criminal behaviours, specifically violent behaviours such as intimate partner violence and sexual offending in mentally ill adolescents, and potential moderators and mediators of these links.

Maja Dekovic is a full professor at the Utrecht Centre for Child and Adolescent Studies (CAS) of Utrecht University, The Netherlands. Her research area includes children and adolescent normative and deviant development, parent-child relationships, family interaction and effects of family-based interventions.

Wim Meeus is a full professor at the Utrecht Centre for Child and Adolescent Studies (CAS) of Utrecht University, and the Department of Developmental Psychology of Tilburg University, The Netherlands. His research area includes development of identity and personality in adolescence, personal relationship, in adolescence, adolescent psychopathology and longitudinal research.