The four guest editors share a varied, fruitful, and enjoyable history of working together based on their overarching research interest in adolescent development and the transition to adulthood from a life-course and life-span perspective. In particular, they share an interest in the conceptualization of agency, its multiple dimensions, its interdependence on structural constraints, and its development over time and in context. Being well versed in and passionate about longitudinal panel data analyses, their more recent discussions, particularly those conducted at the first European conference of the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) in Prague in Fall 2014, crystallized in the recognition that the conjoint development of individual agency components across the adolescent life course had received rather scant attention in research. Drawing on these discussions, the idea of a special issue was born. The objective of this special issue is to explore the codevelopment of selected indicators of student agency and to examine their conjoint impact on educational outcomes in adolescence and young adulthood. As the guest editors bring together expertise in diverse disciplinary fields and use longitudinal data collected in different educational contexts (Finland, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and United States of America), this intellectual enterprise seemed worthwhile pursuing.
We would like to thank the editors of Research in Human Development for offering us the opportunity to present these ideas and the related research in this journal. We are also very grateful for the wonderful support, suggestions, and encouragement we have received from the journal editors from the inception of this endeavor to its completion.