In this article the author, Daniel J. Levinson, with the use of collected research, talks about adult development and its various phases. He goes over peoples’ life course, life cycle, and the “eras” of a person’s life cycle; he goes over the life structure and its development in adulthood. Along with this he talks about the overall study of adult development as its own respective field. He discusses that people can not necessarily be defined just by adolescence and use that as a basis of comparison for how people turn out as seniors. Not only must one’s mature or adult stages of life be considered but the phases within those years and the events within those phases must be understood to make proper connections. These phases must also not be put in hierarchical positions because no phase that people go through is necessarily better than the ones that precede it they are just an old phase that will eventually be grown out of.

The topic of this article is adult development and what Levinson is specifically looking at are the phases between the ages of 17 to 65 which he considers the lifespan of the adult years. For this research, he used reports of acts, behavior, and events building off of previously done research on this topic. To gather this, he would have used public records/research that was already published which required in depth analysis of the qualitative data found.

I found this research to be incredibly insightful into the phases of adulthood which was something I always lumped together as one phase. Seeing people’s lives broken down into a structure that can be carried across to all types of people was fascinating. It gave me a better look into adulthood  gives an incredible as well as objective perspective on this topic. One thing that was the most interesting to me was seeing how he broke down the adult life span into nine separate groups but keeping with his idea that there is no hierarchy among them only transitions from one phase to another without any being better or less developed than the others.

Levinson, Daniel J. “A Conception of Adult Development.” American Psychologist 41, No. 1 (1986): 3-13.