Normative Sexuality Development in Adolescence: A Decade in Review, 2000–2009

This review details a key innovation across the field of adolescent sexuality research over the last decade—conceptualizing sexuality as a normative aspect of adolescent development. Anchored in a growing articulation of adolescent sexuality as having positive qualities and consequences, we provide an organizing framework for understanding sexuality as normative and developmentally expected. Using this framework, we report on 3 specific areas of research that have developed “critical mass” over the past decade: new views on sexual behavior, sexual selfhood, and sexual socialization in the 21st century. We conclude by suggesting that the next step in the field of adolescent sexuality development is the explicit…