On March 23 and 24, 1998, the Forum on Adolescence gathered an interdisciplinary group of researchers and practitioners to review the state of knowledge about adolescent development at a workshop entitled New Research on the Biology of Puberty and Adolescent Development.
This workshop focused both on puberty--a set of physical changes rooted in biology that can be timed and measured--and on adolescence--a more general and gradual coming of age that occupies much of the second decade of life and is, as one researcher has written, "rooted in society" (Crockett and Petersen, 1993:45).
Participants represented diverse fields and brought to the workshop knowledge about an exceptionally wide range of research, including the fields of pediatric and adolescent medicine, public health, neuroendocrinology, behavioral genetics, anthropology, psychiatry, psychology, sociology, animal behavior, law, and others.