The conflict management skills of 16 women receiving self-esteem training were assessed before and after the program. Most made significant gains in self-esteem and at the same time developed nonadversarial styles of conflict management. (SK)

The Personal Development Plan is a process through which individuals take responsibility for planning their training and development. The process involves assessing one's life as a whole, including expectations, ambitions, job skills, home and personal life, and the wider community. (SK)

Argues that while education is essential for democracy, democracy is also essential for education. Thus, the teaching of democratic values should form the foundation of the education curriculum, the object of which is to encourage individual choices, experiences, and empowerment thereby achieving a continued capacity for growth. (Contains 23…

In a participative psycho-biographical study, interviews with 16 individuals investigated the effect of spirituality on career behavior. Spirituality influenced career purpose, sense-making, and career coherence. It inspired four purposes: developing/becoming self, unity with others, expressing self, and serving others. (Contains 55 references.)…

Proposes the Integral Nursing framework, which combines Wilber's All-Quadrant/All-Level model, a heuristic device to organize human experience, and the Spiral Dynamics model of human development organized around value memes or cultural units of information. Includes commentary by Beth L. Rodgers. (Contains 17 references.) (JOW)

A life-course development perspective depicts stages of family development with tasks for each stage. It addresses the diversity of family relationships and illustrates how human development includes individual, generational, and historical time. (Contains 14 references.) (SK)

Five proposals are made for incorporating a work-play perspective in career development research: (1) fuse work and play conceptually over the life course; (2) imbue developmental career theory with a work-play fusion; (3) study work and play across the life span; (4) investigate work and play within the life space; and (5) consider a work-play…

Explores significance of new reference groups for maintenance of self-esteem from standpoint of Berger's sociology of knowledge. Argues from Berger's perspective that even extremely powerful experiences of self-acceptance are in desperate need of ongoing "plausibility structure" to reinforce new sense of self. Describes implications for…

A learning-disabled adult offers an autobiographical account of his educational, social, and vocational experiences. (Author/DB)

Discusses various views of domain-specificity. Argues that it is time to move beyond an acknowledgment that constraints on the way knowledge is represented influence the way in which new learning proceeds. Directions for future research are pointed out. (RH)

Considers the possibility of the use of a politically sensitive analysis informed by feminist critique as a way of dealing with the problems of relativism exposed by deconstruction. Discusses implications of deconstructionist thought for work in the field of human development. (PCB)

Argues that the interrelationship of developmental conditions, social provisions, and personal decisions provides a framework for a general theory of development. (PCB)

This paper describes an evolving systems approach for use in exploring aspects of creativity, including: measurement of creativity; uniqueness; processes which amplify deviation; novelty and progress; chance and purpose; networks of enterprise; self-concept; difficulty, duration, and purpose; sudden insight; and sequential stage theories. (JDD)

Several commentaries on Howard Gruber's paper, "The Evolving Systems Approach to Creative Work," are offered: "How High Should One Climb to Find Common Ground?" (Robert Albert); "Where is the Evolving Milieu?" (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi); "Creativity: The Individual, The Systems, The Approach" (Todd Lubart and Robert Sternberg); and "Quality and…

Considers Greek myth of Oedipus and proposes an Oedipus cycle, in contrast to Freud's Oedipus complex, which represents not the unconscious passions of a small boy, but rather the awareness of the life cycle in the larger context of the succession of the generations and their mutual interdependence. (Author/NB)