The first edition of Developmental Social Psychology was published in 1995. SALES: Life 18711 (11941 Home, 4166 Export, 2604 US) MAT 1631 (1310 Home, 222 Export, 99 US) We sold circa 3,000 copies per year for the first three years The text provides a comprehensive account of social development from infancy to old age, with more emphasis on infancy and childhood. It also looks at many aspects of cognitive development from a social perspective, which allows it to be used not only on social development courses, but also as a general developmental psychology text by those whose focus is on social development. It covers a very wide range of material with clarity, elegance and humour, and is widely reported by adopters to be extremely popular with students. It is currently one of the few non US focussed social development texts, and is widely used in the UK, Australia and in northern Europe.
We undertook market research amongst adopters and non-adopters, and whilst suggestions were made for minor changes, the overall feedback was to encourage Kevin to update the book throughout as soon as possible, keeping the structure as it is, and keeping the relative weighting of infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age. Since there was no consensus at all on either major omissions or on extraneous material, we decided that the best plan for an update was largely to keep to the original plan, so I didn't ask Kevin to submit a new proposal. What's more, we really can't let the book get any longer, and one of the main strengths of the book is it's breadth and depth of coverage, meaning nothing can be dropped, so a general update seems the best option. Instructors were asked if they would like more teaching features and more illustrations - the consensus was "no", although we may well put together a website. There is, generally, a dearth of good social development texts which do not focus exclusively on US research and examples, and, with the increase in student numbers in psychology, we can look forward to building on the success of the original.