Editorial

The International Journal of Developmental Science (IJDS) is facing some profound changes for the new year 2024. It is my privilege and pleasure to share some of these changes with you now: The academic publisher Sage has acquired IOS Press¹ – thus, the IJDS has become part of the Sage product range. Further changes to the Editorial Board and to the group of Editors of the journal will gradually be announced on the journal’s website in parallel with the journal’s conversion to APA7th guidelines and the journal’s migration from the manuscript online tracking system “MSTracker” to “Editorialmanager”. Previous editions of the IJDS have already been devoted to congress publications, such as the “Workshop on Aggression”, for which reports on the respective workshop or papers submitted from the portfolio of papers presented have been published repeatedly in recent years (e.g., Beelmann & Lutterbach, 2023; Fandrem & Strohmeier, 2020; Scheithauer, 2019; Scheithauer et al., 2018). In the future, we will continue to offer scientific congresses with a thematic focus on developmental science the opportunity to draw attention to themselves in the IJDS. At the beginning of next year 2024, for example, the abstracts for the 15th International Conference on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology (ICCAP 2023) (held in August 2023, in Kuching, Sarawak, on Borneo Island) will be presented followed by a special issue including selected papers from this conference. Thus, look forward to the exciting changes and innovative new features in 2024!

The present, final issue of Volume 17 of the IJDS comprises two regular and one invited article. Zarra-Nezhad et al. introduce the universal preventive intervention POMPedaSens program in early childhood education and care (ECEC) in Finland. “The program aims to promote children’s social-emotional learning (SEL) by supporting ECEPs’ engagement and emotional availability” (p. 122). The authors also report results from an evaluation study and their first results “prove that the program may effectively build ECEPs’ capacity to promote children’s SEL” (p. 122). Lee et al. (2023) report results of their study of college students’ occupational identity and its role in successful transition to adulthood using Q methodology. They conclude with important recommendations for interventions to reach students with suboptimal views of their occupational perceptions. Finally, Purdy et al. (2023), using data from the Blurred Lives Project, describe the development of a multi-dimensional co-ding system to categorize qualitative responses of adolescents with lower socioeconomic status, related to negative online behaviors, such as cyberbullying. Due to a lack of suitable instruments, this coding system – and shortly presented further developments – close a gap in the research literature, more precisely in the assessment of negative online behaviors.

Enjoy reading the exciting articles in this issue of the IJDS.

Herbert Scheithauer (Ed.-in-Chief IJDS).