Health promotion for adolescents: preventive and corrective strategies against problem behavior

This paper, in its first part, gives an overview of research on "problem behavior" in adolescence. Adolescence is considered to be a stage in life characterized by more experimentation, exploration, risk-taking, and rebellion than any other stages. Many health-damaging behaviors (drug consumption, precocious sexual activity, riskful driving, aggressive behavior, etc.) have important psychosocial functions in adolescents' developments. Some of these behaviors can be signals of "stress", defined as a bio-psycho-social state of tension resulting from a variety of stressors which confront adolescents daily in modern industrial societies. In the second part of the paper, the implications of this research for strategies of intervention are discussed. The systematic analysis distinguishes between different stages in the process by which problem behavior emerges and separates "preventive" from "corrective" forms of intervention. Additionally, the analysis differentiates between the dimensions targeted by the measures: interventions addressed toward individual behavior ("personal resources") on the one hand, and living conditions ("social resources") on the other hand. The resulting types of intervention approaches are illustrated with examples and discussed in view of how appropriate they are for health promotion in adolescence. Implications for "social policy for adolescents" are discussed.