A Century of Change

This chapter evaluates how it was in the early years of the twentieth century, as adolescence emerged as a defined life stage marked by intensive peer interaction, that adolescent qualities started to overflow the boundaries of adolescence proper, seeping upward into the adult world. Demonstrating the rise of the adolescent character over this long stretch of time involves various methods and sources of information. For the earlier years, systematic studies of personality and character traits were uncommon; evidence of the growing salience of adolescent attributes must rest primarily on a blend of historical and anecdotal evidence along with hints of emergent trends from scattered polling results. After the war, social science research flourished, and systematic, large-scale studies became more common, providing the foundation for more rigorous trend analysis. This mixed bag of evidence points to a steady rise of adolescent qualities over the decades, incubating first in the intimate circles of the adolescent realm and gradually moving outward and upward to find a home in society at large.