Capturing the peer context: the paradox of progress

Adolescents lead enormously complicated social lives. Many youth find it difficult to keep track of their own relationships with friends and romantic interests. For the investigator, the task is exponentially more complex because overlapping and interlocking relationships and networks must be disentangled, dissected, and diagrammed. This special issue contains some important new findings about peers, but it is equally noteworthy because it illustrates several significant methodological changes in the way we do business. New ways of thinking about peers and new ways of analyzing data about peer relationships promise to simplify many aspects of our research enterprise. Pictograms occupying every bit of space on laboratory walls are rapidly becoming a thing of the past. By the same token, however, these advances have revealed the limits of our assumptions and the inadequacies of our practices, particularly when it comes to the depth and frequency of our data collection efforts. This is the paradox of progress. In this essay I will summarize some of the methodological developments highlighted in this special section and I will describe some important implications that these improvements hold for research in the future.