The Study of Process and the Nature of Explanation in Developmental Science

The question of "how" occupies center stage in the explanatory efforts of developmental science and establishes the study of process as the field's defining mission. In line with this mission, recent decades have witnessed a new wave of focus on taking seriously issues of time, variability, and context in the study of development. For many in the field, however, fully espousing a process orientation for developmental science requires an abandonment of the structural explanation in which the field is historically steeped-for example, the organizational sequencing and directionality established in the "grand theories" of classic developmental accounts. Metatheoretically, the idea that a process orientation actively conflicts with a structural orientation rests on the conceptual conflation of different kinds of structural explanation. Such conceptual conflation, in turn, derives from the adoption of an ontological framework that reduces all explanation to mechanistic antecedent-consequent relations. The purpose of this article is to frame developmental science's pursuit of the question of "how" within the broader context of metatheoretical division that characterizes the field's approach to explanation itself.