Developing in a Dynamic World Harnessing Psychology to Support the COVID-19 Generation

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic and other social dynamics created a myriad of challenges and changes for individuals, groups, and societies. The impacts on youth are particularly noteworthy given developmental processes of adolescence and emerging adulthood. As psychologists, we have much to offer in studying how 2020 influenced their development and in shaping effective supports. To be useful, the work must be nuanced, iterative, and attentive to their lived realities. We argue for a dynamic research framework to study these developmental processes. Through such an approach, psychological science can provide insight into diverse young people’s experiences of COVID-19 with a focus on addressing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 3, 4, and 16 on increasing a sense of well-being, making education more equitable, and developing more peaceful societies. The paper lays out three theoretical frameworks—Synthetic, Augmentative, Generative, and Experiential (SAGE), Meanings, Observations, Viewpoints, and Experiences (MOVE), and the Developmental Peacebuilding Model (DPM)—that can be used to capture the dynamism of meaning making and development within changing contexts. We then provide examples from our research with young people in the United States and Ireland. The paper ends with a call for psychologists across the globe to understand and address COVID-19’s impacts on youth through iterative, integrative research methods with a focus on meaning making. In coordination with macro-level metrics, such work can help understand lived psychosocial impacts on diverse groups of young people, while highlight opportunities to support SDGs 3, 4, and 16.