Age Norms and Life Course Framework

Human Development in Time and Place

• This chapter explores the evolution of life course theory, integrating contexts, temporality, and human agency.
• Context refers to the social embedding of individuals, encompassing biographical, historical, and ecological variations.
• Life course theory examines age-graded patterns of events and roles throughout a person's life up to death.
• Life course ideas in developmental science, social roles, relationships, and age-graded concepts are addressed conceptually. A theoretical orientation that captures dynamic lives within changing contexts.
• There are core principles to the life course: a lifelong process of human development and aging, event timing, human agency, interconnectedness, and historical/local context.
• Ecological concepts of multiple levels (family, community, economic region, and country) are significant.
• Social inequalities across class, ethnicity, and gender shape individual and generational experiences in cumulative ways.
• Life course processes have been explored from the 1960s, highlighting the interrelation of social relationships and age.

Life Course Theory

• The development of life course theory was a response to the challenges of studying the life course beyond childhood.
• It was largely a product of increased longitudinal studies, examining how social roles and relationships, and age-graded patterns, influence developmental science.
• Life-span concepts, social roles/relationships, including age and temporality are crucial components used in modern life course theory.

Bringing Contexts and Temporality to Lives and Development

• The socioeconomic context of human development was highlighted by the Great Depression.
• Research in the Oakland and Berkeley studies focused on physical growth and development, family relations, but they lacked explicit socioeconomic context.
• Subsequent research highlighted the role of historical time and social change on individuals' lives and their developmental processes.
• Contemporary life course theory, including ecological and biological dimensions, has been emphasized since the 1960s, promoting interdisciplinary knowledge.

Elementary Life Course Concepts and Perspectives

• Social pathways: Trajectories of positions within institutions and life phases.
• Duration: Time spent in social roles and status. This accumulates across a lifespan.
• Cumulative effects: The enhancing or diminishing effects of prior experiences over time. Social patterns accentuate behaviors.
• Chains of events: Sequences linking potentially risky or positive experiences.
• Social trajectories: Consistent patterns of behavior over the life span connected with social patterns.
• Developmental trajectories: Developmental or psychological pattern over time.
• Transitions: Distinct changes in social roles. Could include moving schools, or assuming new familial roles.
• Turning points: Marked changes that significantly alter life trajectories. May also be referred to as 'knifing-off' experiences, changing future prospects.
• Social Change and Life Transitions: Discusses how people adapt to change at various life stages (such as parents adjusting to economic hardship) and how these experiences might result in 'cumulative disadvantage' (a negative impact of early experiences on later outcomes).
• Social pathways, cumulative effects, and the duration of experiences are fundamental to understanding dynamic views of context.
• Theoretical mechanisms link specific experiences to their contexts.

Life-Span Concepts of Human Development

• Life-span concepts focus on the influence of cultural and historical context on individual development.
• This covers timing, age expectations, and the nature of age norms.
• These relate to how expectations and behaviors vary according to cohort and historical context, and create differing effects on life.

Social Relations: Roles and Relationships

• The life cycle perspective, prevalent until the 1960s, focused on developmental stages across life, often with a focus on family.
• Now, research increasingly looks at interconnected lives across generations and social roles.
• Individuals often inhabit multiple roles.

The Principle of Linked Lives

• Lives are lived interdependently and interconnected through shared experiences and relationships.
• Interdependent lives illustrate the critical role of significant others in affecting transitions and trajectories through life, considered an important social context.
• This perspective includes how social relationships span multiple generations and how they can be both supportive and influential to experiences.
• The principles of timing and linked lives complement each other to present life course dynamics better, incorporating context and the effects of social change.

The Impact of Historical Time and Place

• Major historical events can significantly impact developmental trajectories by altering socioeconomic conditions, opportunities, and constraints.
• Example events explored are the Great Depression, World War II, the breakup of the Soviet Union, and German re-unification.
• Key periods of social change highlight the interplay between individual choices and larger social factors, demonstrating how individuals are situated within broader historical and cultural contexts.
• Using longitudinal designs to study cohorts (groups born within the same time period) helps to ascertain the varying effects of historical periods on specific individuals, highlighting the age-period-cohort interaction.

Human Development in Context

• The study of human development has increasingly focused on context, including both temporal and ecological dimensions.
• The past half-century has seen a move towards integrating diverse perspectives to more fully understand human development.
• Historical change and its social and ecological effects are central to understanding individual development across the lifespan.