Life Course Theory PDF

CHAPTER 2 Human Development in Time and Place GLEN H. ELDER JR., MICHAEL J. SHANAHAN, and JULIA A. JENNINGS INTRODUCTION 1 LIVES AND CONTEXT: HUMAN AGENCY THE DEVELOPMENT OF LIFE COURSE THEORY 2 AND SO...

CHAPTER 2 Human Development in Time and Place GLEN H. ELDER JR., MICHAEL J. SHANAHAN, and JULIA INTRODUCTION 1 THE DEVELOPMENT OF LIFE COURSE THEORY 2 Bringing Contexts and Temporality to Lives and Development 5 Life-Span Concepts of Human Development 9 Social Relations: Roles and Sequences 10 Age and the Life Course 12 Converging Research Traditions in Life Course Theory 14 ELEMENTARY LIFE COURSE CONCEPTS AND PERSPECTIVES 14 Social Pathways, Cumulative Processes, and Durations 15 Trajectories, Transitions, and Turning Points 19 Social Change and Life Transitions 21 Linking Mechanisms 21 Paradigmatic Principles 23 INTRODUCTION The life course and human development has flourished as a field of study during the past quarter century, extending across substantive and theoretical boundaries (Mortimer & Shanahan, 2003), and now appears in many subfields of the social, behavioral, and medical sciences. With this change has come an increasing appreciation for link- ages between changing contexts and human development. We thank Ross Parke, Avshalom Caspi, and Richard thoughtful reviews of the earliest version of this 1998a) and to Lilly Shanahan for her valuable review version (Elder & Shanahan, 2006). Rainer Silbereisen a most helpful review of the present version. Our to the staff of the Carolina Population Center for preparation of the first two versions of the chapter under a grant from Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NIH/NRSA T32 HD07168) and to Terry Poythress for her preparation of this version. Handbook of Child Psychology and Developmental 2 Human Development in Time and Place This contextualization of lives and developmental pro- cesses occurs through the patterning of social roles, events, and age distinctions; and in a multilevel context of fam- ily/primary group, neighborhood, community, economic region, and country. The meaning of historical time and context stems in large part from the ecological process of place and its multiple levels (Bronfenbrenner, 1979). A distinctive feature of this ecology is its social inequalities of class, ethnicity, and gender. They are expressed across individual lives and the generations in cumulative dynam- ics of advantage and disadvantage through childhood, adolescence, and the adult years. We begin this chapter by viewing the evolution of life course thinking as a response to the challenges that stem from following children into young adulthood, middle age, and late life. This chapter is also a product of the remarkable growth of these studies from the 1960s to the end of the century. Life course ideas in developmental science, social roles and relationships, and concepts of the age-graded life course are prominent in this conceptual advance. By the end of the 1990s, a new synthesis, linking theory on social relationships and age, had become a theoretical orientation on the social life course and its influences on human development in historical and ecolog- ically defined contexts. Multiple lives are interdependent in this developmental process. The elementary concepts and perspectives of life-course theory are surveyed next, with emphasis on the individual life course, its institutionalized pathways, and its social and developmental trajectories and transitions. Early research on social change in lives has generated a set of mecha- nisms that link lives and developmental dynamics to chang- ing contexts. These mechanisms include the life stage of people when they encounter drastic change to their envi- ronment, the social imperatives that structure adaptations to new situations, the control cycle that life change initi- ates (loss of personal control prompts efforts to regain such control), and the tendency for new situations to accentuate matching dispositions. These mechanisms are embedded in a conceptual framework on the life course and develop- ment that is defined by core paradigmatic principles—t life-long process of human development and aging, ing of events in the life course, human agency, the interde- pendence of lives, and historical time and place. these mechanisms and principles by drawing on relevant theory and research. Traditional thinking about the place or location of individuals is undergoing significant elaboration through ecological studies of human development. We turn to this of their intersection within social structure” (p. 149). Mills started with the individual and asked what features of soci- ety produce such a person. He argued that the seemingly “personal problems” of one’s biography are better under- stood as repercussions of broad social tensions. He had few empirical examples, however, and was not concerned with dynamic views of person and context. Rather, he focused on types of society and adult behavioral patterns, with lit- tle recognition of social change, development and aging, or even human diversity. In this age of the cross-sectional survey, studies that followed children and adults over part of their lives were very rare. This was especially true for longitudinal studies of people in their social and histori- cal contexts. With this in mind, it is not surprising that a dynamic concept of the life course had not yet appeared in the scholarly literature and was not addressed in the semi- nars of leading graduate programs. The unfolding story of life course theory up to the present owes much to path-breaking studies that were launched more than 80 years ago at the Institute of Child Welfare (now Human Development) at the University of California in Berkeley: The Oakland Growth Study (birth years 1920 to 1921) and the Berkeley Growth and Guid- ance Studies (birth years 1928 to 1929). These studies were launched around 1930–1931. When the studies began, no one could have imagined what they eventually would mean for the field of human development. The original investigators did not envision research that extended into the study members’ adult years, let alone into the later years of middle and old age. There were many reasons for this focus on childhood and adolescence. Except for support from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Foundation, funds for longitudinal studies were virtually nonexistent. The National Institutes of Health (NIH), major funders of such studies today, were not established until after World War ll. With support from NIH, the classic Framingham Longitudinal Heart Study of the adult years was launched in 1946 and has evolved into a multigenerational project. However, the idea of adult development had not yet captured the atten- tion of social, behavioral, and medical science. A mature field of adult development and aging was still decades away from becoming a reality. In the United States, the National Institute of Aging was not established until the mid-1970s. Nonetheless, these barriers did not restrict the studies from continuing into the adult years and middle age. The Institute of Human Development contacted members of the Oakland Growth Study for interviews in the late 4 Human Development in Time and Place to human development beyond childhood and to contexts beyond the family. Such work offered great promise for illuminating the intergenerational dynamics of parents and their children. The extension also enabled documentation of the implications of early childhood experience for health in later life, a research domain of major scientific significance in the 21st century (see Herd, Robert, & House, 2011). Child-based models of development had little to offer because they did not address development and aging in the adult life course and were not concerned with changing social contexts. For the most part, the Oakland and Berkeley studies of continuity and change from childhood to the adult years were limited to evidence of correlational patterns between measures at time l and time 2 (Jones, Bayley, Macfarlane, & Honzik, 1971). The intervening years and their mechanisms remained a “black box.” Little, if anything, could be learned about linking events and processes from such analysis. This observation also applies to Kagan and Moss (1962) who studied children in the Fels Longitudinal Study from “birth to maturity” by using correlation coef- ficients to depict behavioral stability across the years. Their approach ignored the diverse paths children take into adult life. By age 23, some of the study members followed a path to college, full-time employment, and marriage, and others entered military service or mixed employment and education. The timing of such transitions was important in determining their meaning and implica- tions. For example, adolescent marriage and parenting are coupled with more social and economic constraints than the same transitions that follow a normative timetable, whereas late family formation maximizes the disruptive effect of young children. However, these considerations of timing and context—so richly descriptive of lives—were of little interest. In large part, this inattention reflected the view that continuity of behaviors and psychological dispositions required little explanation aside from the label “stability.” Empirical studies of children into the adult and midlife years revealed major limitations to conventional knowledge of human development, which, in turn, posed major chal- lenges for the future study of behavior: To replace child-based, “ontogenetic” accounts of development with models that apply to development and aging over the life course. To think about how human lives are organized socially and develop over time, exhibiting patterns of constancy and change. are expressed in expectations about the timing and order of a transition or change in state, whether relatively early, on time, or late. The life course can be linked historically to specific transitions and to the meanings of cohort mem- bership (Riley, Johnson, & Foner, 1972). Birth year locates people in specific birth cohorts and thus according to par- ticular social changes. The social life course of individuals is embedded within specific birth cohorts and their eco- logical dynamics. These dynamics may take the form of cumulative processes of life course inequality. These dynamics may be expressed as cumulative pro- cesses of social inequality from early childhood into the adult life course. Disparities in socioeconomic status, eth- nicity, and gender can initiate processes of disadvantage or advantage that increasingly differentiate people over the life course. There are numerous scenarios of cumulative disadvantage, such as the early death of a parent, which results in a child’s depressed feelings, behavior problems in school, erratic attendance, and the eventual loss of opportu- nity. Potential turning points along this life course can lib- erate youth from the grip of this negative dynamic such as through residential change that improves family life and the school environment (Wachs, Chapter 21, this Handbook, this volume). G. H. Elder, this chapter’s senior author, encountered such ideas about age and the life course in the 1960s, shortly after arriving at the Institute of Human Develop- ment (at UC Berkeley in 1962) to work with sociologist J. A. Clausen on the Oakland Growth Study. The dra- matic changes of families and individual lives across the 1930s focused his attention on the patterning of lives and connections to a changing socioeconomic environment. Codes that captured trajectories were needed for peo- ple’s lives instead of the conventional codes for status at a point in time such as socioeconomic status (SES). The link between age and time provided an important step in this direction. The resulting perspective suggested a way of thinking about the social construction of individual lives, along with ideas from the life-history tradition of the early Chicago School of Sociology. Children of the Great Depression (Elder, 1974/1999) represented the pub- lished version of this initial effort to fashion a life course framework. Since its inception, the field of life course studies has expanded its purview beyond historical variations to include dynamic contextual variations within and between cohorts—the ecology of human development (Bronfenbrenner, 1979). Studies revealed dramatic cohort diversity with respect to poverty experiences and economic 6 Human Development in Time and Place (before family income change) and 1933, the very worst year of the economic depression. This Great Depression project evolved from the senior author’s research affiliation with the Oakland study at the Institute of Human Development in the 1960s. Trained in both sociology and psychology, Elder had been hired by the new director of the institute, sociologist Clausen, to work toward a design for coding the Oakland data. The ever-changing families of the Oakland Study sensi- tized Elder to the need for temporal concepts and measures and focused his attention on “ways of thinking about social change, life pathways, and individual development” (Elder, 1998b, p. 1). But how to conceptualize them? His prior work on adolescence and the transition to adulthood introduced him to the research of Neugarten (1968) on the meanings of age and age-graded expectations and timeta- bles. This anthology includes Neugarten’s pioneering papers from the 1950s and early 1960s. Other age concepts on historical time and timing were associated with birth year and age cohorts, as developed by Ryder (1965). Role theory and the social capital of linked lives pro- vided another way to think of the life course and its rela- tion to other lives. The concept of role transitions by life stage indicates whether the transitions are early or later in a person’s life. Roles and their behavior could be viewed in terms of experiences that are brought to them and in terms of the time span of “being in that social role,” as well as according to issues of continuity and discontinuity associ- ated with leaving a role. Along with the traditions of life history and career studies, the concept of life cycle was per- haps the most prominent perspective on a person’s life at the time, especially regarding family life. In a life cycle of generational succession, the young person is socialized to maturity, gives birth and nurtures members of the next gen- eration, grows old, and dies. Each concept has relevance to a person’s life path. Role theory, as well as the life cycle, became part of an effort at the Institute of Human Develop- ment to develop a theoretical approach to individual lives and human development that would be useful for a study of the Oakland cohort across the Great Depression. With fam- ily income available for 1929 and 1933, the Oakland study could assess the extent of socioeconomic deprivation and its consequences among families and the study members. This approach to lives in changing times and places has evolved into a prominent theoretical orientation on the life course in the twenty-first century. Notable developments have occurred across the social and behavioral sciences, from sociology (Elder, 1974/1999, 1975, 1985; Riley et al., 1972), demography (Ryder, 1965), history (Hareven, advances in the study of “the ecology” of human devel- opment. Sampson (2012) has used the term ecometrics to refer to social observational methods in studying urban and rural places (see also Wachs, Chapter 21, this Handbook, this volume). Cross-disciplinary models of collaboration, particularly with psychology and history as well as biology and the medical sciences (Elder, Modell, & Parke, 1993; Levy & the Pavie Team, 2005). These models include new and exciting developments in subfields devoted to the study of physical and emotional well-being (Halfon & Hochstein, 2002; Hertzman & Power, 2003; Kuh, Ben-Shlomo, Lynch, Hallqvist, & Power, 2003). New initiatives from the Maternal and Child Health Bureau emphasize the life course perspective, such as the formation of a Maternal and Child Health Life Course Research Network. The objective of the network is to facilitate life course studies that inform Maternal and Child Health programs, policy, and practice and improve “health outcomes for mothers and children.” A growing awareness that, beyond history and the differing experiences of cohorts, social change may entail an ecological change within cohorts through diverse life histories (Shanahan, Mortimer, & Kruger, 2002). Aspects of a social ecology are typically inter- correlated, and their synergistic interactions are critical to an understanding of time and place. These developments represent significant advances in studies of the life course and human development. Life course theory today has much in common with inter- actionist thinking at the micro level, with its emphasis on transactions between person and ecology (see Magnusson & Stattin, 2006)—but it also attends to the organizations and reorganization of social structures and pathways through life. As might be expected, life course theory shares many objectives and concepts with Bronfenbren- ner’s ecology of human development (1979; with Morris, 2006), especially its multilevel concept of the environ- ment. However, life course models bring a more temporal perspective to the environment and individual. The life course paradigm also shares the ambition of life-span developmental psychology in rethinking the nature of human development and aging (Baltes, Lindenburg, & Staudinger, 2006), but it is more contextual in orientation and application. Indeed, the contextual limitations of the Oakland and Berkeley life-span studies in the early 1960s motivated efforts to place lives and developmental processes in historical time and social pathways. 8 Human Development in Time and Place Life-Span Concepts of Development Psychosocial stage, adult stages of development Developmental trajectories Cumulative advantage, disadvantage Selective optimization with compensation Life review, autobiographical memory Person-Context Interaction Figure 2.1 The emergence of life course theory: underdeveloped on the contextual side. None of them provided an understanding of the lived lives of the study members in historical time. Pioneering work under the theme of life-span concepts features the studies and writings of Erikson (1950) on ego identity and psychosocial stages of development as well as the foundational contributions of Baltes (1997) to the evo- lution of life-span developmental psychology, from the late 1960s into the 21st century. This contribution includes his conceptualization of the process of selective optimization with compensation, a metatheory of development and aging discussed more fully in the pages to come. In a younger generation, Lerner (1982, 1991) emphasized the relative plasticity and agency of the organism, the multidirection- ality of life-span development, and the lifelong interaction of person and social context. The concept of developmen- tal task, perhaps first defined by Havighurst (1949), also represented a way of viewing development across socially defined life stages. The concept alerts the analyst to the possibility that different experiences and skills tend to be highly salient at different points in life. However, empirical evidence for distinct psychosocial stages is not compelling. The perceived or defined life course can change with aging through successive life reviews (Staudinger, 1989) in which the past is assessed in light of the present. Several topics illustrate distinctive contributions to the third strand of life course theory—age and temporality. Every event in life is marked by an age, such as marriage and the birth of children. Birthday celebrations mark each new year for a young child who is surrounded by adults who are getting older. In the first volume of the Annual Review of Sociology (Elder, 1975), the senior author’s essay focused on two life course perspectives based on age, the role of age and birth year in a cohort historical perspective, and a sociocultural perspective involving age expectations, identities, and norms. Social and cultural anthropologists, such as Mead (1963) and Linton (1942), observed and wrote about the role of age-graded societies and lives. Early contributions to the scholarship of age in the 1920s appear on the cohort level, as in the work of Mannheim (1952). Age as birth year locates people as members of a birth cohort in social history. During the 1950s and 1960s, Neugarten (1968, 1996) at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Human Development developed a social psychology of age across the life span. She explored concepts of age expectations and identities, standards, and norms in pioneering studies during the 1950s. In the 1970s, sociologist Riley (Riley et al., 1972) proposed a framework on age strata and cohorts for a macroscopic perspective on aging, drawing on Ryder’s influential perspective (1965) regarding cohorts in the study of social change. A cohort perspective based on people born in a particular year or a specific historical time soon began to appear with some frequency, as in studies of women’s work by Uhlenberg (1974), research on role sequences in the transition to adulthood by Hogan (1981), and Birth and Fortune, a volume by Easterlin (1987). In the field of social history, accounts of institutional and cultural change brought historical insights to the lives and pathways of young people (Modell, 1989) and adults (Hareven, 1978, 1982). With these brief overviews in mind, we turn to the development of life course theory, beginning with life-span concepts of development. Life-Span Concepts of Human Development A number of efforts in the psychological sciences have been made during the post–World War II era to link developmen- tal trajectories to social structure. However, research ques- tions did not ask about the implications of environmental change for the developing individual. The theory of psychosocial stages formulated by Erikson (1950) paid attention to cultural variations, but historians report little empirical support of his stages across 10 Human Development in Time and Place history-graded and nonnormative influences are most consequential across the early and middle years of adulthood. Changes occur in relation to positive and nega- tive events, gains, and losses, with the likelihood of expected losses increasing. Biological resources decline over the life span, but cultural resources may increase through the cultivation of wisdom and problem solving. Life-span development entails selection, optimization, and compensation. These mechanisms seek to maxi- mize gains and minimize losses or declines. Selective optimization with compensation represents a “life-span model of psychological nature of human aging and the ubiquitous, age-related shift toward a less positive balance of gains and losses” (Baltes, 1993, p. 590). The way these mechanisms or strategies work in later life is illustrated by an interview with the renowned concert pianist Arthur Rubenstein. When asked how he remained a successful pianist in his later years, Rubenstein referred to three strategies: “(1) he performed fewer pieces, (2) he now practiced each more frequently, and (3) he introduced more ritardandos in his playing between fast segments, so that the playing sounded faster than it was” (Baltes, 1993, p. 590). The strategy of selection is illustrated by Rubenstein’s con- centration on fewer pieces, the more frequent practice illus- trates the use of optimization, and the increasing reliance on contrast in speed exemplifies a strategy of compensation. This psychological model of successful aging has rele- vance for development at all ages including childhood and adolescence. Adaptations in adolescence can be viewed through the guidelines of selective optimization in which gains are maximized and risks, losses, or deprivation are minimized (see Heckhausen, Wrosch, & Schulz, 2010). Youth select activities in which they are competent (e.g., athletics, academics, military service, and optimize benefits through an investment of time, energy, and relationships. Life-span developmen- talists such as Baltes have enriched our thinking about development and aging across the life course, and they have given some attention to the role of social, cultural, and historical forces in developmental processes. However, their perspective on life-span development generally fails to apprehend social structure as a consti- tutive force in development. The problem stems from the framework’s conceptualization of context—it refers to age-graded, history-graded, or nonnormative influences. Age-graded influences shape individual development in largely normative ways for all people; history-graded The life cycle represented a dominant model of the social life span from the early 1900s to the 1960s. In its most precise definition, life cycle refers to a sequence of roles in parenting, from the birth of children through their maturity and departure from the home to the birth of their own children. In a life cycle of generational succession, newborns are socialized to maturity, give birth to the next generation, grow old, and die. The cycle is repeated from one generation to the next in a human population (O’Rand & Krecker, 1990). As reproductive cycles, the life cycle can vary greatly in tempo through variations in the timing of childbirth, whether very early or late in life between the generations. Role change in one generation has consequences across the generations, ascending and descending (Burton, 1985). When the eldest daughter has a child before the age of 13, her mother may become a grandmother before the age of 30 and a great-grandmother before the age of 50. A sequence of early childbearing across the generations weakens the generational and age foundation for family authority and social control. Family authority over a newborn child tends to shift upward from the teenage mother to the grand- mother. By contrast, late childbearing slows the cycle and minimizes age similarities across adjacent generations. Entry into later-life relationships may provide the social control to stabilize a person’s life and minimize involve- ment in unconventional and dangerous activities. In their Boston sample, Sampson and Laub (1993) reported that bonds to conventional figures provided a route of escape from delinquency for a number of men with a childhood history of delinquency. During the familistic post–World War II years, the life cycle became well known as the family cycle, through the writings of Glick and Hill, as a set of ordered stages of parenthood defined primarily by variations in family composition and size (Elder, 1978). Major transition points included courtship, engagement, marriage, birth of the first and last child, the children’s transitions in school, departure of the eldest and youngest child from the home, and marital dissolution through the death of one spouse. This sequence of life stages is based on a concept of marriage that bears children and remains intact up to old age and death. Deviant patterns are excluded, such as marriages without children, those preceded by children, the widowed and divorced whether with or without children, and serial marriages (see also Ganong, Coleman, & Russell, Chapter 4, this Handbook, this volume). The emerging complexity of contemporary family life did not fit this concept of the life cycle. First, childbearing 12 Human Development in Time and Place cannot offer a precise way of connecting people’s lives to changes in society, whereas age and/or birth year does offer such a perspective. A social role-generation perspective and a temporal- contextual perspective based on age are complemen- tary in thinking about the social life course embedded in a social-historical context. One of the best research examples of why this convergence is important comes from The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (Thomas & Znaniecki, 1918). This pioneering work was described in the 1960s as “the greatest single study done thus far by an American sociologist” (Nisbet, 1969, p. 316). The lives of immigrants embodied the discontinuities of the age; they were socialized for a world that had become only a memory. The societies they left and entered—the Old World and the New—presented contrasting pathways for individual adaptation and development. Matters of social and historical time are clearly relevant to this project, and yet, Thomas and Znaniecki were largely insensitive to them. For many years, the social role/life cycle perspective continued to offer a valuable way of thinking about the social patterning and interdependence of lives, although limited in a number of respects that we have noted. In the 1970s, this approach was combined with new understand- ings of age to form life course models with the analytic virtues of both theoretical traditions: linked lives across the life span and generations, coupled with the ity of age and context through an age-graded sequence of events and social roles, embedded in birth cohorts. These models were also enriched by life-span concepts of human development that feature the agency of individuals in constructing their lives. Age and the Life Course A greater understanding of the meanings of age in peo- ple’s lives during the 1950s and 1960s provided a way of thinking about the relation of historical location and its ecology to life patterns with its events and social roles across the life span. The link between age/birth year and historical time occurred in large part through the influential essay of Ryder (1965) on the cohort as a way of studying social change and its effects on people and populations. Riley et al. wrote a comprehensive work on this topic in Aging and Society (1972). This important volume relates birth cohorts and age-graded roles. Both Ryder and Riley provided conceptual models for this relatively undeveloped field of study at the time. stage it occupies.” This mark may take different forms. One type of outcome involves cohort differences, such as the less adverse effects of hardship among the older Oakland boys in the Great Depression study than among the much younger Berkeley boys (Elder, 1974/1999). For another perspective, consider age at entry into World War II. The age range spanned 20 years: Some recruits were launching their adult lives, whereas others were in their mid-30s with families and careers. In addition to cohort effects, history may take the form of a period effect when the influence of a historical change is relatively uniform across all age groups. Rodgers and Thornton (1985) found that marriage and divorce rates did not vary across the 20th century by age groups. On rates of marital dissolution, they observed that “the big picture is one of overwhelmingly historical effects that influenced all subgroups of the population substantially and surprisingly equally” (p. 29). Concerning divorce, they referred espe- cially to the rising level up to the 1930s, the decline in the Great Depression era, a rapid recovery to the extraordinary peak of divorce in the mid-1940s, and then to the upward trend during the 1960s and 1970s. The precise explanation for such period influences was not determined. When theory and research focus on the cohort level, the linking mechanisms between lives and changing times have been difficult to pin down. Cohorts can be merely “black boxes” with no information on causal dynamics and link- ages. Speculation frequently takes the place of disciplined explication. Another issue concerns environmental varia- tion within cohorts. Thus, some children may be exposed to the economic stress of a plant closing, whereas others are insulated from such stresses by their father’s different place of employment. In response to such heterogeneity, more studies are investigating specific types of differential social change within a single birth cohort (George, 2009). The age-graded life course. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Neugarten directed a research program that featured the concept of a normative timetable and individual deviations from age expectations. The timetable refers to the social meanings of age, as defined by people’s expectations regarding events and social roles. In theory, age expectations specify appropriate times for major transitions, and violations of them may lead to adverse consequences, from informal sanctions to lost opportu- nities. There is an appropriate time for entering school, leaving home, getting married, having children, and retir- ing from the labor force. With colleagues (Neugarten, Moore, & Lowe, 1965), Neugarten observed a high degree of consensus on age norms across some 15 age-related 14 Human Development in Time and Place Consistent with this interpretation, Americans in their 20s who perceived themselves to be relatively late in the transition to adulthood were found to be most committed to an advanced path of higher education in a national longitudinal study (Benson & Elder, 2011). Young peo- ple who defined themselves as adults ranked lowest in socioeconomic origin and educational plans. Similar to Neugarten and Peterson’s finding of life course acceler- ation in later life among adults in the lower SES, these young people were following an accelerated subjective path to adult status. Research on age and the subjective life course represents an example of how investigations of the meanings of age have opened up a way to think about identity in a context of changing roles across the life course. The sequence of age-graded roles and statuses depicts a social trajectory of the life course, and its transitions from one role to another that influence how young people view themselves and others. Converging Research Traditions in Life Course Theory Contemporary theory on the life course and its social dimensions differs from the perspectives of an earlier era by joining the life-cycle processes of social relation- ships with the temporal and contextual aspects of age. In Children of the Great Depression (Elder, 1974/1999), the social role perspective was combined with the analytic meanings of age for linking family and individual experi- ence to historical change, and for identifying age-graded trajectories across the life course. Both theoretical strands provide essential features of a social life course on matters of time, context, and process. The life course is age-graded through social institutions and structures, and embedded in relationships that constrain and support behavior. In addi- tion, people are located in historical settings through birth cohorts and are linked across the generations by ties of kinship and friendship. By integrating social relationship concepts and age- based distinctions on social trajectories, along span concepts of the person, the life course framework offered a promising approach to the contextual study of human development in longitudinal samples (Figure 2.1). Both the individual life course and a person’s developmen- tal trajectory are connected with the lives and development of others. Life course theory thus took issue with life-span studies that viewed human development as an unfold- ing process that is not coactive with social and cultural processes in historical time. Moreover, the life course and in so doing establish developmental constraints for choices and generate individual agency at the micro The multilevel nature of the life course and human devel- opment invites different points of entry, each with specific questions, ranging from cultures and social institutions to human biology and the genome (Shanahan & Porfeli, 2002). A single study commonly employs different entry points for aspects of the same project. Thus a project moti- vated by the impact of rural change on children’s social and emotional development should be framed by an initial focus on the transformation of rural communities and the economic well-being and hardships of families within these communities. Such a study would be incomplete without reference to the adaptive patterns of parents and children: their developmental trajectories of behaviors, psychological profiles, and health. Indeed, empirical studies of the farm crisis (1980 to early 1990s) in the United States, as it played out in central Iowa, tell us that the distinction between families engaged in farming versus families living in the small rural towns was key to linking social change and young people’s Parts of this study might also investigate the determinants of specific emotional or social outcomes and relevant pro- tective resources in the family, a point of entry that centers on the developmental status of the child. Still other entry points might begin with the interchange of parents or with sibling relationships. Each point could become a framing statement for an independent study, although all entry points provide insight into a central guiding question about context. By studying diverse aspects of the same problem, the processes of social change and individual development give life to variables otherwise considered “social addresses,” such as SES, sex, and ethnicity. Considerable leverage in conducting such studies is provided by concepts and perspectives that bridge social change, place, and individual development, theoretical tools that reflect decades of empirical study. To understand this conceptual bridge, we turn to elementary concepts. First, we begin with multiple levels of the life course, ranging from institutionalized pathways to cumulative patterns of context, which shape the individual life course. Developmental science is ultimately directed to the study of adaptive and maladaptive patterns of change and constancy at the level of the person. Yet institutionali pathways provide a broad context for development and set the stage for cumulative patterns of social experiences that shape the individual’s life course. Second, other temporally sensitive concepts—most notably, trajectory, transition, and turning point—are taken up with particular emphasis 16 Human Development in Time and Place boundaries, what Merton (1984) called “socially expected durations.” Children who are held back in school become aware of their lagging status on the educational ladder (Alexander, Entwisle, & Dauber, 1994), and company managers talk about the relation between age and grade in prospects for promotion to senior rank (Sofer, 1970, p. 239). A growing body of research also considers early entry into adult roles—what Burton (2007) aptly called “adultification”—as well as pathways into retirement (Kim & Moen, 2002). Whether a new phase of life, emerging adulthood, now characterizes pathways into adulthood is a lively topic of inquiry (Bynner, 2005). In addition to their age-graded nature, pathways struc- ture the direction that people’s lives can take. Pallas (2003, p. 168–169) observed that pathways have distinct fea- tures that govern how strongly people’s trajectories and behaviors are shaped, including, for example, the number of options a pathway leaves open in the future, the extent of mobility that is likely to be experienced, stigma and extrinsic rewards, and the importance of personal choice. Some pathways provide future opportunities and chances for upward mobility based on personal motivation, whereas others effectively block promising avenues irrespective of one’s efforts. Importantly, these pathways reflect social arrangements as found, for example, by McFarland (2006) in how a particular high school chooses to implement a math curriculum. Pathways are also multilevel phenomena reflecting arrangements in place at levels of culture, the nation-state, social institutions and organizations, and locale. To varying degrees, people work out their life course in established or institutionalized pathways. At the macro end of A. JENNINGS LIVES AND CONTEXT: HUMAN AGENCY AND SOCIAL OPTIONS 28 Context and the Life Course 28 Conceptualization and Measurement 29 Selection and the Life Course: A Social Process 32 THE IMPACT OF HISTORICAL TIME AND PLACE 35 Studying Lives in Context: Some Considerations 35 Social Change in Life Course Health: The Case of China 37 Societal Dissolution and Unification: Their Impact on Young Lives 38 HUMAN DEVELOPMENT IN CONTEXT 42 REFERENCES 43 The term context refers to the social embedding of individ- uals and typically entails study of biographical, historical, and ecological variations. The social concept of life course refers to a temporal pattern of age-graded events and roles that chart the social contours of biography, providing a proximal context for the dynamics of human development from conception and birth to death. Conceptual and methodological breakthroughs asso- ciated with the interdisciplinary life course framework, coupled with the dramatic expansion of long-term longitu- dinal studies, have generated more research and knowledge Lerner for than ever before about behavioral adaptations in real- chapter (Elder, world settings around the globe. We are also increasingly of the second aware of people as agents of their own lives. New avenues provided special thanks of research have opened, and the future offers exciting promise for understanding how dynamic views of con- text and the person—including biological dimensions— interact to influence achievements, exposure to stres- sors, physical and psychological well-being, and social involvements. Science, 7th Edition, edited by Richard M. Lerner, Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 1 10.1002/9781118963418.childpsy402, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781118963418.childpsy402 by Columbia University Libraries, Wiley Online Library on [08/01/2025]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License work and the theoretical implications of research on social contexts and the flow of families and children between them. Lives are lived by entering and leaving social roles, groups, and places. What factors influence these decisions? How can we understand human agency and contextual effects as parents construct the residential life course of their children? We investigate such questions through studies of place and migration in the lives of families and children. Genetic dispositions are relevant to this process, and we refer readers to our prior edition of this chapter (Elder & Shanahan, 2006) for such coverage. Ecological influences are expressed in part through the impact of their historical time on lives and developmental processes. Although studies have tended to consider eco- logical effects apart from historical context, we attempt to inform this section of the chapter with both perspectives. Three topics highlight their interdependence: (1) consid- erations in studying changing times in lives; (2) societal change in lives, with a focus on contemporary China and its rural–urban divide; and (3) the impact of social discontinu- ities on the life course of young people during the dissolu- tion of the Soviet Union into multiple sovereign states (late 1980s) and the reunification of Germany (1991). These two events transformed life in Eastern Europe, especially for the young who faced a new world of opportunities and stresses. We conclude this chapter by noting that the contextual fron- tier on human development is moving toward an integration of ecological and temporal perspectives. The title of this chapter reflects its intergenerational, life course, and longitudinal perspective. Longitudinal samples enable us to follow children into adolescence and then to young adulthood with its social roles of advanced educa- tion, military service, parenthood, and work. According to this developmental life course perspective, children age into adulthood and its family roles, and parents eventually become grandparents. At any point in the life span, all ages are commonly represented in a person’s social world. The developmental significance of early life experience becomes most fully understood in the context of the later years. he the tim- THE DEVELOPMENT OF LIFE COURSE THEORY We discuss The magnitude of intellectual development in life course studies is suggested by considering studies of person and society during the 1950s. In his widely read The Socio- logical Imagination, C. Wright Mills (1959) encouraged “the study of biography, of history, and of the problems 10.1002/9781118963418.childpsy402, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781118963418.childpsy402 by Columbia University Libraries, Wiley Online Library on [08/01/2025]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License The Development of Life Course Theory 3 1950s, and another follow-up, scheduled in 1972 to 1973, joined the lives of all study members, some parents, and offspring, in an intergenerational framework. The Berke- ley Guidance and Growth Studies became part of this follow-up. By the 1970s, Block (with the assistance of Haan; see Block & Haan, 1971), had completed a pioneer- ing longitudinal study focused on continuity and change in personality from early adolescence to the middle years in the lives of the Oakland and Berkeley study members. Also during the 1970s, Vaillant (1977) followed a panel of Harvard men (recruited as students between 1939 and 1942, known as the W. T. Grant Study) into the middle years of adulthood, assessing mechanisms of defense and coping. Another study at the Institute of Human Development (Elder, 1974/1999) placed the lives of members of the Oakland Growth Study and Berkeley Guidance Study in the Great Depression and traced the influence of hardship on family life, careers, and health up to midlife. Using data from a retrospective life history survey, this study also investigated the impact of military service in World War II and the Korean War on men’s lives. To cap off this active decade, investigators at the institute conducted a multifaceted study that revealed patterns of continuity and change in social roles, health, and personality, with a distinctive emphasis on life patterns across the middle years (Eichorn, Clausen, Haan, Honzik, & Mussen, 1981). Both historical cohort comparisons and intergenerational connections were part of this project. At Stanford University, a research team headed by Robert Sears actively followed members of the Lewis Terman sample of talented children into their later years. The Terman Study had become the oldest, active longitu- dinal study at the time, with birth years extending from 1903 to the 1920s. By the 1990s, the project had assembled 13 waves of data spanning 70 years (Holahan & Sears, 1995), and research was beginning to show the historical imprint of the times on the study members’ lives, from the 1920s to the post–World War II years and into old age (Crosnoe & Elder, 2004: Shanahan & Elder, 2002). Over 40% of the men entered military service during World War II and 25% were involved in war industries on the home front (Elder, Pavalko, & Clipp, 1993). The lives of women in the Terman sample vividly reflect the gender-role constraints of society on their employment. This extension of the child samples to the adult years provided an initial momentum for the scientific study of adult development and sharpened awareness of the need for a different research paradigm that would pay attention 10.1002/9781118963418.childpsy402, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781118963418.childpsy402 by Columbia University Libraries, Wiley Online Library on [08/01/2025]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License To relate lives to an ever-changing society, with empha- sis on the developmental effects of social change and transitions. As a whole, these challenges represent a view of human development advocated by proponents of contextualized development (e.g., Cairns & Cairns, 2006) and by the early Chicago school of sociology (Abbott, 1997), especially William I. Thomas. In the first decades of the twentieth century, a time of transformation in U.S. society, Thomas made a persuasive case for studying social change as “experiments of nature” in the lives of immigrants and children. Inspired by The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (Thomas & Znaniecki, 1918), researchers began to use life-record data to investigate the impact of social change. Before most of the innovative longitudinal studies had been launched, Thomas urged in the mid-1920s that priority be given to “the longitudinal approach to life history” (Volkart, 1951, p. 593). He claimed that studies should investigate “many types of individuals with regard to their experiences and various past periods of life in different situations” and follow “groups of individuals in the future, getting a continuous record of experiences as they occur.” Social transformations of the 20th century raised many questions about historical variations beyond family life and kinship, such as schools, neighborhoods, and communities. In the classic Middletown studies (Lynd & Lynd, 1929, 1937), findings on families during the 1920s seemed to have little relevance to family life in the Great Depression. Life course theory emerged in response to such issues and to the challenge of an aging population as well as the rapid growth of longitudinal studies. In the terminology of this chapter, the life course refers most broadly to a theoretical orientation (or paradigm) that provides a framework for the study of changing lives in changing contexts. To use the distinction of Merton (1968), theoretical orientations estab- lish a common field of inquiry by defining a framework that guides research in terms of problem identification and formulation, variable selection and rationales, and strategies of research design and analysis. Based in large part on sociocultural theories of age and social relationships (Elder, 1975; Neugarten, 1968; Ryder, 1965), the concept of life course refers to a sequence of age-graded events and roles that defines the sociological contours of biography. A sociocultural perspective gives emphasis to the social meanings of age. Birth, puberty, and death are biological facts, but their meanings in the life course are social facts or constructions. Age distinctions 10.1002/9781118963418.childpsy402, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781118963418.childpsy402 by Columbia University Libraries, Wiley Online Library on [08/01/2025]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License The Development of Life Course Theory 5 fortunes, residential mobility, and neighborhood compo- sition (Shanahan, Sulloway, & Hofer, 2000). Each life is marked by social change in these respects, and the life course framework is useful in studying how these dynamics shape lives and also how the social aggregate of individual life patterns affect social institutions, such as schools and labor markets. Bringing Contexts and Temporality to Lives and Development The socioeconomic context of human development became a compelling social issue in the hard times of the Great Depression (1930s), but the economic crisis did not place this theme on the research agenda of the California longitudinal studies, the Oakland and Berkeley projects (see Duncan, Magnusson, & Votruba-Drzal, Chapter 14, this Handbook, this volume). They continued to reflect the research interests of the investigators rather than the eco- nomic depression. The Oakland Growth Study focused on physical growth and development, a long-time interest of a codirector, and employed methods of social observation in field settings. The Berkeley Study under Jean Macfar- lane’s leadership stressed the collection of data on family relationships and parental influences. Data collection for both projects included information on the socioeconomics of family life, but the investigators did not make effective use of the data in empirical research. It would be diffi- cult to know from study publications that the Oakland and Berkeley children were growing up during the Great Depression. The absence of a socioeconomic-cultural context beyond the immediate family in the Berkeley Study was noted by a faculty member whom Macfarlane had invited to one of the study’s seminars. In a letter dated September 25, 1941, this person (identity unknown) expressed dismay concerning the neglect of material culture. In his view, family was overemphasized at the expense of other cultural factors. With reference to the case of a young girl in the study, he observed that “she is described as a person of almost any age in almost any society.” Despite an inade- quate contextualization of development, the early Berkeley and Oakland studies made sure that measures of the mate- rial culture were used in data collection across the 1930s and thus ensured that these data would be available to sub- sequent generations of investigators. As a result, the senior author was able to carry out a longitudinal study of “chil- dren growing up in the Great Depression.” The Oakland data archive included socioeconomic information for 1929 10.1002/9781118963418.childpsy402, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781118963418.childpsy402 by Columbia University Libraries, Wiley Online Library on [08/01/2025]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License 1978, 1982; Modell, 1989), and anthropology (Kertzer & Keith, 1984), to ecological models (Bronfenbrenner, 1979) and life-span developmental psychology (Baltes & Nesselroade, 1979). Major examples include: Recognition of a life course perspective on human devel- opment that extends from the prenatal period to maturity, late life, and death. The rapid growth of longitudinal studies that link childhood to the adaptations of later life has facil- itated what might be called a “whole life course” approach to human development and aging (Elder & Giele, 2009). An understanding of the trajectory of human development and aging begins in the prenatal years. This observation is a foundational theme of the Millennium National Longitudi- nal Study in the United Kingdom. The project was launched during 2000 and 2001 as a study of how the British people age from birth to old age and death. Life-history calendars for the collection of retrospective accounts of life events have been applied to numerous longitudinal studies (Brückner & Mayer, 1998; Caspi et al., 1996; Freedman, Thornton, Camburn, Alwin, & Young-DeMarco, 1988). Retrospective life history methods enable investigators to collect information on the life history of people and their world, though retrospection always entails some error of recall. Greater appreciation for the necessity of longitu- dinal and contextually rich data (Ferri, Bynner, & Wadsworth, 2003; Hauser, 2009; Phelps, Furstenberg, & Colby, 2002). In a special issue of Science, Butz and Torrey (2006) refer to the longitudinal study design as one of the greatest innovations of the 20th century in the social sciences—“a living observatory and potential laboratory augmented by case study and ethnography.” Bynner (2014) describes the longitudinal survey as “the essential tool for meeting the challenges of a (developmental) science that needs to adapt continually in response to social, economic, technological, and political change.” Appropriate statistical techniques have been developed for multilevel, longitudinal studies. They include hierar- chical linear and trajectory models along with structural and dynamic person-variable and person-centered tech- niques (Bergman, Magnusson, & El-Khouri, 2003; Collins & Sayer, 2001; Little, Schnabel, & Baumert, 2000). Significant advances have also been made in the study of historical and cohort effects through new age-period-cohort methods that provide better estimates and identify explanatory mechanisms (Yang & Land, 2013). The past two decades have also witnessed major 10.1002/9781118963418.childpsy402, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781118963418.childpsy402 by Columbia University Libraries, Wiley Online Library on [08/01/2025]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License The Development of Life Course Theory 7 These connections with life course theory and research add up to a much larger intellectual advance, one framed by relational developmental systems thinking in a multilevel, dynamic perspective known as developmental science. From the 1998 edition of the Handbook of Child Psychol- ogy and in the sixth edition, Lerner (2006, p. 6) observed that students of human development have witnessed “a sea change that perhaps qualifies as a true paradigm shift in what is thought of as the nature of human nature and in the appreciation of time, place, and individual diversity for understanding the laws of human behavior and develop- ment.” Consistent with the central theme of this chapter, Lerner asserted that “one must appreciate how variables associated with person, place, and time coalesce to shape the structure and function of behavior and its systematic and successive change” (2006, p. 7). The principal traditions that led to an interdisci- plinary framework of life course theory are illustrated by Figure 2.1: life-span development, social roles and relationships, and age and temporality. We begin with life-span concepts of development because this line of work prompted efforts to contextualize developmental processes across the life span. Two theoretical traditions in social science, social roles/relationships and age, provide a way to think about the social life course. Social roles and role transitions are basic elements of the life course, but they are timeless. That is, a role transition is not specific in terms of when it occurs. Chronological age brings time and timing to the social life course, and thus makes it more dynamic as a contextualization of development. Age data on birth year also locate individuals in historical time and in relation to ecological processes. Life-span development refers in some ways to the longitudinal research that was underway at the Institute of Human Development when the senior author joined the staff to work with the Oakland Growth Study (in 1962). Bayley and Honzik were involved in longitudinal stud- ies of intellectual development from childhood into the adult years (Jones et al., 1971). Other longitudinal studies focused on the stability of temperament dimensions from the early years into adulthood. Block had launched a program of research that used the California Q Sort to assess personality in adolescence and the adult years for a longitudinal study of life-span trajectories of personality. This project became Lives Through Time (Block & Haan, 1971). In method, most especially, this ambitious study represents a path-breaking example of a person-centered study of life-span trajectories of personality. However, this project, as well as others noted earlier, was seriously 10.1002/9781118963418.childpsy402, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781118963418.childpsy402 by Columbia University Libraries, Wiley Online Library on [08/01/2025]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License Social Roles and Relationships Age and Temporality Life cycle of social roles, Age-grades, expectations, generational succession concepts of age status identity, proscriptive and prescriptive Social roles, status, age norms role-playing Social pathways and trajectories Role transitions and sequences Transitions and turning points Socialization as learning Cohorts - Birth cohorts Intergenerational relations, and social change, structural lag exchange Social networks, capital Life Course Theory 1960s to present Research traditions and their concepts. In the theoretical tradition of “social relations,” we come to a long prominent way of thinking about a person’s lived life, with a focus on the sequence of social roles, their socialization, and self or identity. The sequence establishes a life course that links the person to others. Central to this tradition is Merton (1968) on role sets and reference groups, Rosenberg (1979) on self-esteem, and Bronfenbrenner (1970) on socialization, to name a few. Early work in this tradition includes the studies of Thomas (Thomas & Znaniecki, 1918) on social roles and transitions in life his- tories, Mead (1934) on socialization and the self, Hughes (1971) on work and the self, Lewin (1948) on power- dependence relations, and Vygotsky (1978) on language, the self, and social relationships. Studies of intergenerational relations have expanded from two to three and now even four generations, with important contributions from Jackson (2000) and his three-generation study of African Americans along with a rural Iowa longitudinal study of three generations (Elder & Conger, 2000). The most impressive multigeneration lon- gitudinal study to date was initiated by Bengtson circa 1970 (Bengston, Putney, & Harris, 2013) on contemporary issues of the generation gap. Launched in the greater Los Angeles region, this study has continued into the present century with four, and even five, living generations. 10.1002/9781118963418.childpsy402, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781118963418.childpsy402 by Columbia University Libraries, Wiley Online Library on [08/01/2025]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License The Development of Life Course Theory 9 time and place (Mitterauer, 1993). In The Seasons of a Man’s Life, Levinson (1978) outlined a theory of life struc- ture that ignored variations in social structure and culture over historical time. Psychosocial transitions were affixed to age as if immutable to institutional change, such as the midlife transition between ages 40 and 45. For Erikson, Levinson, and other ontogenetic theorists, the starting point is a sequence of stages through which all persons must pass. This perspective views the social context as a “scene or setting” through which the person—loaded with his or her “natural predispositions”—must pass. By contrast, the life course paradigm views the interplay of social context and the organism as the formative process, making people who they are. Individuals do not “develop according to their natures” but, rather, they are continually produced, sustained, and changed by their social context (see Gottlieb, Wahlsten, & Lickliter, 2006). Proponents of life-span developmental science ad- dressed the challenges of such a view by seeking a per- spective on development and aging across the life span that emphasized cultural influences and learned experi- ences or skills in patterns of aging. In theory, historical and cultural variations emerge as potentially influential sources of human adaptation and development. As Baltes (1979, p. 265) observed, “restricting developmental events to those which have the features of a biological growth concept of development is more of a hindrance than a help.” Baltes (1993, 1994) played a lead role in the con- ceptual articulation of life-span development since the 1960s. More than most proponents of this perspective, he interacted with life course ideas and distinctions over the decades (see Baltes et al., 2006). One panel exchange between Baltes and Elder on life-span developmental psychology and life course theory was held at the 2004 Ghent meeting of the International Society of Behavioral Development. The following propositions on life-span development are not new in themselves but they add up to a distinctive perspective: Life-span development results from lifelong adaptive processes in which some are cumulative and continuous, and others are discontinuous and innovative, showing little connection to prior events or processes. Ontogenetic development is local, specific, and time bound, so it is never fully adaptive. There is no pure advance or loss in development. Age-graded influences are most important in the depen- dency years, childhood/adolescence and old age, but 10.1002/9781118963418.childpsy402, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781118963418.childpsy402 by Columbia University Libraries, Wiley Online Library on [08/01/2025]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License influences shape development in different ways for dif- ferent cohorts; and nonnormative influences reflect idiosyn- crasies (such as physical) (see Stearns, Chapter 20, this Handbook, this volume). This conceptualization is unduly restrictive in two senses. First, within-cohort variabil- ity largely reflects non-normative influences, which are not easily subject to scientific study (Dannefer, 1984). As a result, the social basis for within-cohort differ- ences becomes a residual category. Second, as Mayer (2004) noted, life-span psychology views historical and nonnormative influences as idiographic (i.e., unique, non- repeating), leaving only age-graded influences, which are thought to be largely based on biology and age norms. Because the larger social forces that lead to age norms are of little interest, within-cohort regularities in behavior are explained solely by personal attributes (biology and institutionalized norms). In the final analysis, the study of contextual influences in cohorts is hampered because it produces largely invariant patterns through such age-graded influences, or it cannot be studied because of its seemingly random nature. Some of these issues were dampened by the initial enthusiasm of Baltes for cohort studies and the analysis of interindividual differences in intraindividual change. But in retrospect, it appears that Baltes’s volume on cohort studies with Nesselroade in 1979 was followed by a decline in his regard for them. Nevertheless, some life-span investigators (e.g., Heckhausen, 1999) have continued to assess the link between broader social contexts and individual functioning across the life course. In the field of developmental science, there are numerous examples of this line of work, such as Silbereisen’s Jena research program on social change and human development, with its featured research on the impact of German Unification. We provide an overview of this research on pages 44–47. or street life) resources, Social Relations: Roles and Sequences The second column of Figure 2.1 refers to how an individ- ual’s life pattern is structured by multiple role sequences, their transitions, and “linked lives,” Transitions into and out of social roles across the life span entail both social and personal changes in status and identity (Glaser & Strauss, 1971). Changes in major social roles, such as from living with parents in a dependent role and then moving to an independent household with a spouse, generally represent a change in life stage to the status of an adult. This process involves human agency in the selection of role options as well as social influences and constraints. 10.1002/9781118963418.childpsy402, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781118963418.childpsy402 by Columbia University Libraries, Wiley Online Library on [08/01/2025]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License The Development of Life Course Theory 11 has become increasingly uncoupled from marriage. Chil- dren are increasingly born prior to marriage or outside of marriage altogether. In the United States, the prevalence of divorce from the 1960s to the present has led to multiple families in a person’s life and to the likelihood that most children will experience a single-parent household before they enter adulthood (e.g., Fussell, 2002). Even with these limitations, the life-cycle concept and its family cycle tell us much about the social matrix of one’s life—the linked lives. They knit together a full array of family relationships through life stages and the generations, providing insight into family processes such as socialization and social con- trol over the life span. They connect the developing person and his or her career. Another feature of this complexity emerged as mothers increased their involvement in the labor force over the last quarter of the 20th century. This upward trend posed another limitation for the life-cycle framework and sug- gested the need for a dual career perspective to study these families and the lives of their members. However, even in the early 1970s, a prime era for life-cycle research, Young and Willmott (1973) found that studies of work and family were typically proceeding along separate paths with no substantial effort to investigate their interdependence and coordination problems. This observation contrasts rather strikingly today with a flourishing study of the interlocking trajectories of work and family life (Drobnic, Blossfield, & Rohwer, 1999; Moen, 2003). Life course models have been constructed to capture this dynamic. In all of these ways, the life cycle of family roles entailed shortcomings in thinking about the life course of children and their parents. The temporality of age addresses some of these limitations by supplementing its relational approach with a temporal and contextual perspective. Entry into social roles in the life cycle may follow a certain temporal order, but these role transitions are not temporally located in a person’s life. For example, a life-cycle model of a person’s life might locate marriage before the first birth, but it would not indicate whether the marriage occurred at 20 or 40 years. The evidence suggests that event timing matters because social timetables, age norms, and age-graded sanctions influence behavior. The concept of generation in the life-cycle perspective occupies a common historical location relative to histor- ical events such as the economic recession that occurred between 1980 and 1983. A parent generation may have birth years that span 30 years, a period that could include eras of economic boom and bust in the 20th century. As such, it is apparent that generational role or position 10.1002/9781118963418.childpsy402, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781118963418.childpsy402 by Columbia University Libraries, Wiley Online Library on [08/01/2025]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License Before Ryder’s essay on cohorts, the birth years of study members in surveys and longitudinal studies were most unlikely to be considered a way to locate people in history. Even the historical context of empirical studies received minimal attention (Thernstrom, 1964), although Bronfenbrenner (1958) demonstrated the importance of doing so by showing that the findings of two surveys of social class and childrearing made sense when one noted that they were carried out in different eras of the 20th century. Ryder’s influential essay increased the sen- sitivity of social scientists to the historical context of lives and their birth cohorts. In addition, the surge of newly initiated longitudinal studies provided a dynamic approach to age and its mean- ings across the life span. This fresh perspective on age reflected the pioneering work of Neugarten (Neugarten, 1968, 1996; Neugarten & Datan, 1973) at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Human Development during the late 1950s and 1960s. Her work with colleagues revealed the variability of lives. People do not move across their lives in concert with others of the same age. They vary in the age at which they enter and leave key social roles. In what follows, we more fully describe contributions to the two research traditions on age and the life course, the link between age cohorts and an age-graded perspective on life patterns. In combination, they bring temporality and context to a social perspective on the life course. temporal- A Cohort-Historical Perspective Birth year or date of entry into a system such as school grad- uation locates the individual according to historical time and related social change. With age peers in the cohort, the individual is exposed to a particular segment of histori- cal experience as he or she moves across age-graded roles. To grasp the meaning and implications of birth year and cohort membership, the investigator specifies the distinc- tive historical events and processes at the time as well as characteristics of the cohort, such as its size and compo- sition. These characteristics are themselves a consequence of historical changes in birth and death rates, immigration, and migration. As successive cohorts encounter the same historical event, they do so at different life stages, defined by social roles, maturity, and life experiences. This means that adja- cent cohorts bring different life experiences to the change. Ryder (1965, p. 846) stressed this life-stage principle in his account of cohort differences in the life course. As each cohort encounters a historical event, whether depression or prosperity, it “is distinctively marked by the career 10.1002/9781118963418.childpsy402, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781118963418.childpsy402 by Columbia University Libraries, Wiley Online Library on [08/01/2025]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License The Development of Life Course Theory 13 characteristics in samples of middle-class adults. The data not only show a general agreement among men and women on the appropriate age for a woman to marry but also support the hypothesis that informal sanctions are associ- ated with relatively early and late marriage. Moreover, the women were aware if they were on time, late, or early with respect to marriage and other major role transitions. This pioneering line of research has been extended in fruitful ways by Settersten. He and Hagestad carried out a study of the perceived deadlines in both family and educa- tion/work transitions in the 1990s among men and women in the Chicago area (Settersten, 2003). A large majority of the respondents claimed that there were deadlines for this type of transition, but Settersten noted that the big challenge in this area is to clarify what is meant by the term age norm. Research on age norms has been limited by the fact that the identification of an age norm typically requires the observa- tion of a relevant sanction—the two phenomena cannot be studied independently. Settersten also made the point that deviations from age expectations and timetables may entail consequences that have nothing to do with informal sanc- tions as we know them. A very late marriage, for example, increases the risk of childlessness. For many decades, age-grades were inferred as possess- ing common significance for members without evidence of their meaning to these individuals. When do young people assume the perspective of an adult? Neugarten was one of the first developmentalists to pose such questions, and she did this work with a sample of adults during the 1950s. She found (see Neugarten & Peterson, 1957) that men with lower socioeconomic status tended to perceive a more rapid passage through the major age divisions of life than did middle-class men: Maturity, middle age, and old age came earlier in the lower SES strata, owing perhaps to class-linked laboring jobs and stresses. The men who relied on mental skills in a sedentary occupation foresaw a relatively long period of productivity, whereas the manual worker expected a relatively short span of productive activity, followed by retirement. Contemporary studies of the meanings of age status have focused on the transition to adulthood. Entry into family roles (marital and especially parental) are typically most predictive of an adult definition of self, and this is what Shanahan, Mortimer, and Porfeli (2005) observed from a contemporary longitudinal study of the young adult transition in an urban sample of midwestern Americans. It is also the case that entry into these roles has been delayed significantly across the 20th century, owing in part to employment and advanced education opportunities. 10.1002/9781118963418.childpsy402, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781118963418.childpsy402 by Columbia University Libraries, Wiley Online Library on [08/01/2025]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License paradigm is responsive to the call by Lerner (1991, p. 27) for more attention to contextual variability and represents a perspective in the field of developmental science (Cairns, Elder, & Costello, 1996) that extends across system levels and disciplines. The contextual perspective of the life course framework has much in common with Bronfenbrenner’s ecology of human development, now called bioecology theory (Bronfenbrenner & Ceci, 1994). His Ecology of Human Development (Bronfenbrenner, 1979) proposed a multi- level view of the sociocultural environment, from macro to micro, but it did not include a temporal perspective on individual development across changing environments. Some years later, Bronfenbrenner (1989, p. 201) noted this major lacuna in his work and proposed the concept of chronosystem with its three interacting components over time: (1) the developing person; (2) the changing envi- ronment; and (3) their proximal processes. This concept has not been widely adopted, but Bronfenbrenner’s eco- logical perspective has appeared in numerous contextual studies of child development, especially in the field of neighborhood influences (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006; Leventhal, Dupéré, & Shuey, Chapter 13, this Handbook, this volume). Human development in life course theory represents a process of organism-environment transactions over time in which the organism plays an active role in shaping its own development. The developing person is viewed as a dynamic whole, not as separate strands, facets, or domains such as emotion, cognition, and motivation. The course of development is embedded in a dynamic system of social interchanges and interdependencies across and within levels. As noted by Bronfenbrenner (1996), this dynamic in life course theory is illustrated well by the interlocking lives and developmental trajectories of family members who are influenced differently by their changing world. We turn now to perspectives and basic concepts that link the social life course and developmental processes. with life- ELEMENTARY LIFE COURSE CONCEPTS AND PERSPECTIVES For a study that is framed in terms of changing times and places, the objective is to link historical and spatial processes with individual development by examining multiple levels of the social environment (Elder & Russell, 2000). Starting with the macro level, societal change may transform social institutions, communities, and cultures, 10.1002/9781118963418.childpsy402, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781118963418.childpsy402 by Columbia University Libraries, Wiley Online Library on [08/01/2025]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License Elementary Life Course Concepts and Perspectives 15 TABLE 2.1 Central Concepts of the Life Course: Social and Developmental Dynamics level. Conceptual Description Examples Social Pathway: Sequences of Tracking within schools; positions within and between occupational career ladders; institutions, organizations, and transitions from school tracks to phases of life labor markets Duration: Time spent in a social Years in poverty; years married status or role, span of exposure Cumulative Effects: Increasing Effect of education on health effect of earlier experiences with becomes stronger as people age the passage of time (akin to compounding interest) Chains of Interrelated Events: Chain of risk: Life events often Sequences of risky or salutary lead to further life-events; experiences across development institutionalization in childhood increases likelihood of additional risks Social Trajectory: Behaviors that Income stream from an likely coincide with pathways occupational career line Developmental Trajectory: Pattern of change in depressed Behavioral pattern over time, often affect through adolescence is associated with coinciding social associated with patterns of patterns in context stressors during the same period lives. Transitions: Discrete change in Transition to first grade, to social role, set of roles, or adulthood, to a new school membership in social organization Turning Point: Change in social Transition to a new school may be circumstances that markedly alters associated with substantial life course, often because of the improvement and child meaning of the event Knifing-Off Experience: Turning Military service can interrupt point that renders earlier life course nascent antisocial career; marriage much less consequential may have similar effect on the properties of social transitions (see Table 2.1). Third, we focus on linking mechanisms that have proven highly useful in the study of change and place. Beginning with studies of children who were born before the Great Depression, research has revealed a set of mechanisms that link context and the individual life course and, as will be seen in subsequent sections, these mechanisms have proven highly probative in the study of place. The paradigmatic themes of life course theory draw on these elementary con- cepts and mechanisms, underscoring the socially dynamic basis for individual development. Social Pathways, Cumulative Processes, and Durations zed Social pathways, cumulative patterns, and the duration of experiences represent dynamic views of context. Pathways typically refer to sequences of social positions in and between organizations, institutions, and phases of life. Institutionalized pathways generally have specified time 10.1002/9781118963418.childpsy402, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781118963418.childpsy402 by Columbia University Libraries, Wiley Online Library on [08/01/2025]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License particular cohorts, and state intervention. Growth of the state in social regulation counters the modern tendency toward individualism. At the personal level, the state “legalizes, defines and standardizes most points of entry and exit: into and out of employment, into and out of marital status, into and out of sickness and disability, into and out of education. In doing so, the state turns these transitions into strongly demarcated public events and acts as gatekeeper and sorter” (p. 167). To be sure, each nation- state represents a unique configuration of laws, rules, and norms that structure the life course. Viewed from this vantage point, cross-national and historical studies become highly strategic in studying societal forces and individual lives and indeed they have become increasingly common as diverse countries collect data containing the same information. The Panel Study of Income Dynamics in the United States (launched in 1968) has become a model for nationwide longitudinal studies in Europe, as in Great Britain and Germany. Multilevel accounts of the life course are well illus- trated by studies of the transition to adulthood (Settersten, Furstenberg, & Rumbaut, 2005), which highlight how changing institutional arrangements and cultural under- standings shape pathways by comparing and contrasting different countries and historical periods. Billari noted that such comparisons are especially powerful among European countries. Each has distinct socioeconomic, political, and cultural features and yet, particularly with the formation of the European Union, they have a growing sense of com- mon identity (Billari & Liefbroer, 2010). His empirical work suggests that the transition to adulthood is becom-

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