Introduction

This special issue is devoted to the topic of "risk and resilience" in human development, a topic that epitomizes the complexity of human development as a process of constancy and change throughout life. The three empirical papers in this issue represent strong contributions to the growing corpus of research on risk and resilience in human development.

First Paper

The first one focuses on the uniquely vulnerable population of urban ethnic minority adolescent males.

Second Paper

The second paper focuses on the risk and resilience from trauma in a sample of mostly Caucasian individuals from rural Iowa, who were at the last assessment, in the midst of transition into young adulthood. It measures an array of mental disorders outcomes and reveals the theoretical importance of timing of the risk factor.

Third Paper

The last paper is a study begun in 1978 of a cohort of individuals with serious adolescent-onset mental disorder. It compares these individuals against the risk and resilience profiles of a matched sample without serious adolescent-onset psychiatric disorder. In sum, this issue adds to the corpus of the frontiers of resilience research.