Life Course

Integrative Theories And Exemplary Populations

Kurt W. Back

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367022334
• eBook ISBN: 9780429728228
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Geografia umana

In this interdisciplinary study of the human life course as a unit, scholars examine aspects of the life course, looking at several features over a short span and at a few traits over a longer period. provides an overview from disciplines (e.g., history, demography, sociology) that are concerned with understanding the human life course; contains studies of special populations in which integration of a variety of experiences over time can be accomplished. Based on these approaches, new methods appropriate to a science of human life are proposed and discussed in a form suitable for students, faculty, and professionals in human development (sociology, anthropology, psychology), demography, and gerontology.

Part 1
Disciplinary Approaches

1. The Life Course and Aging in Historical Perspective

Tamara Κ. Hareven

The Life Course as an Interdisciplinary and Historical Concept

The interaction between individual development, collective family development and historical forces has only recently begun to attract scholars' attention. While the study of the individual life span has for some time commanded the attention of psychologists, and while family development has been the domain of sociologists, it is only recently that an effort to examine these processes in a historical context has begun to mature.

This essay discusses the potential of the life course approach for the understanding of this interaction between individual and collective family development and historical forces. It concludes with the proposal for a future agenda for the development of an historical phenomenology of the life course.

The emergence of the history of childhood and of the family has led historians to an exploration of developmental patterns in the past. Historians now recognize that "childhood," "adolescence" and other stages of the life cycle, particularly as formulated by Erikson (1946) were not just subject to different definitions and experiences in the past but also among different groups in a given historical population. Similarly, they recognize that stages of the family cycle, particularly as defined by Hill (1970), were subject to considerable variation under different historical conditions. As a result, since it is clear that childhood, adolescence, youth, adulthood, middle age and old age were not constant over time, the process of change in their respective definitions and experiences under different historical conditions has become an important research subject. In studying it, historians as well as psychologists and sociologists have begun to discover the limitations of the life cycle and family cycle for historical research, particularly in their formulation of a priori stages, which do not always fit the historical reality (Elder, 1978; Hareven, 1978).

The life course construct overcomes the shortcomings of both the life cycle and the family cycle approach. It examines the synchronization of individual behavior with the collective behavior of the family unit, as each changes over time and in their interaction with external historical conditions. Its essence is the interaction between "individual time," "family time" and "historical time." As Elder (1975, 1978) defines it, the life course encompasses the "pathways" by which individuals fulfill different roles over their lives, sequentially or simultaneously. In measuring the movement of individuals and families from one role or status to the next, or the simultaneous balancing of roles, the life course concerns itself with the process of transitions under different historical conditions.

The life course approach is also interdisciplinary by its very nature: its heritage combines several psychological, sociological and demographic traditions. It draws on life history analysis, on life span psychology, on the sociology of age differentiation, and on the concept of cohorts as developed by demographers.

I will now turn to three essential features of life course analysis of particular significance to historical analysis: 1) Timing, the synchronization of different individual roles over a person's career, as well as the synchronization of individual transitions with collective family behavior; 2) interaction, the relationship between life course transitions and historical changes; and 3) integration, the cumulative impact of earlier life course transitions on subsequent ones.

The first feature is timing. The life course concerns itself with two essential kinds of timing: 1) The timing of transitions over an individual's career, particularly the balancing of entry into and exit from different roles; 2) The synchronization of seemingly individual transitions with those of other family members, and with transitions which the entire family undergoes over its life. These aspects of timing cannot be understood exclusive of their interaction with external historical forces. For that reason, the use of the term "timing" in a historical context requires a specific definition. Elder's definition of timing as age-specific is relevant to a historical setting but, as will be suggested below, in a historical context, age was not the most critical aspect of timing along the life course.

Individually, the crucial question is how people plan and organize their lives and time their transitions. On the non-familial level, entry into and exit from school or the labor force and migration, or on the familial level, leaving or returning home, marriage and setting up an independent household, are all subject to timing. Timing also involves the synchronization of individual moves with familial ones and familial transitions with non-familial ones. For example, the extent to which taking a job is related to leaving home, or the extent to which getting married is linked with needs in one's family or orientation are all subject to synchronization.

The metaphor which captures best the interrelationship of individual transitions and changing family configurations is the movement of "schools of fish." As people age, they group and regroup themselves in different configurations. The functions which they take on in these clusters also vary significantly. Most individuals are involved simultaneously in several family configurations, fulfilling different functions in each. A married adult, for example, is part of both a family of origin and a family of procreation (occupying a different position and fulfilling a different role in each); in addition, such an individual also figures in his or her spouse's family of orientation, and in the spouse's kin network. When a son leaves home, his departure changes the configuration of his family unit. Depending on the status he held, his family might find itself less one bread winner, or less one dependent. When he marries and forms a new family unit, his roles and obligations differ from the ones he held in his parents' unit. This seemingly individual move impinges upon the collective conditions of at least three family units — his family of origin, his newly founded family and his wife's family of origin. In situations where remarriage follows death of a spouse or divorce, the new spouse's family enters the orbit of relationships, while the former spouse's family does not necessarily disappear completely. In case of divorce for instance, a woman would stop relating to her former husband's mother as her mother-in-law but may continue to relate to her as her child's grandmother.

The second important feature of life course analysis is the impact of historical processes on the timing of individual or family transitions. Life course transitions are timed through the interaction of demographic, social and economic factors, as well as under the influence of familial preferences. Demographic changes in mortality, fertility and nuptiality affect the age configurations within the family and the length of overlap among family members over their lifetime. Cultural changes in norms of timing and economic changes in the opportunity structure affect entry into the labor force, job availability and ultimately retirement. Institutional and legislative changes such as compulsory school attendance, child labor laws and mandatory retirement affect entry into the labor force, job availability and ultimately retirement.

The very question of cohort historical or social changes in the life course requires more elaborate definition. "Historical change" is usually defined by non historians as macro-societal change, and as the impact of one specific major event, such as the Great Depression or the war. But actually, the important contribution which historical research makes is in specifying and examining synchronic changes, which often have a more direct impact on the life course than the macro ones. Most importantly, historians can identify the convergence of socio-economic and cultural forces, which are characteristic of a specific time period, and which impinge directly on life course timing.

Ryder (1965) has suggested that social change occurs when there is a distinct discontinuity between the experiences of one cohort and those of its predecessors. However, important historical discontinuities can also occur within the same cohort. Intra-cohort variation is extremely significant for the understanding of social change. Variations in exposure to events by class and community background within each cohort would affect important differences between members of the same cohort.

This leads us to the third feature of life course analysis: the cumulative impact of earlier transitions on subsequent ones. Ά life course approach views a cohort as an age group moving through history whose social experience is influenced not only by contemporary conditions but also by its experience of earlier life course transitions. This pattern can be grasped on two levels: 1) the direct consequences of earlier life course experiences on subsequent development; 2) the experiences of a cohort at one point in time as they relate to historical conditions affecting its previous life course experiences. Elder's Children of the Great Depression, one of the outstanding studies addressing these questions, documents the impact of Depression experiences in childhood and early adulthood on subsequent adult experiences. Within the same cohort of unemployed adults caught in the Great Depression, coping with unemployment would have differed not only in terms of the availability of other resources, personality and family backgrounds, but also in terms of earlier transitional experiences — how long the individual had been working, whether his or her career had been continuous and stable or had already been disrupted, and what historical circumstances had affected such earlier discontinuities.

The life course framework thus offers a comprehensive, integrative approach, which steers one to interpret individual and family transitions as part of a continuous process of historical change, even if they are only observed at one point in time. It also helps one view an individual transition (leaving home or marriage, for example), as part of a cluster of other concurrent transitions and as part of a sequence of transitions affecting each other. In short, the life course approach links individual biography with collective behavior as part of an ongoing continuum of historical change.

Historical Changes in the Timing of Life Course Transitions

The timing of life course transitions has changed significantly in American society over the past two centuries (Hareven, 1977; Uhlenberg, 1978). Demographic, economic and cultural factors have combined to account for differences in the timing of such life transitions as leaving home, entry into and exit from the labor force, marriage, parenthood and post-parental stages and widowhood.

As Uhlenberg (1974, 1978) suggests, over the past century several important demographic developments have tended to effect greater uniformity in the life course of American families, and have considerably increased the chances for intact survival of the family unit over the lifetime of its members. As a result of the decline in mortality since the late nineteenth century, the chances for children to survive into adulthood, and to grow up with their siblings and both parents alive, have increased considerably. Similarly, the chances for women to survive till adulthood and to fulfill the script of marriage, raising of children jointly with a husband, and survival with husband through the launching stage (Uhlenberg, 1974) have increased steadily. For women, these changes, combined with earlier marriage and earlier completion of maternal roles, have meant a more extended period of life without children in their middle years. At the same time, women's tendency to live longer than men has resulted in a protracted period of widowhood in later years of life. Because of lower life expectancy and a greater tendency to remarry in old age, men normally remain married until death (Glick, 1977; Glick and Norton, 1977).

Historical investigation of cohorts of American women from 1870 to 1930 has thus shown that an increasing proportion of the population has entered prescribed family roles and, except for divorce, has lived out its life in family units (Uhlenberg, 1974). Contrary to conventional assumptions, the American population has thus experienced an increasing uniformity in family cycle life course transitions. (The recent increase in solitary residence since the 1950's suggests a change in the pattern [Kobrin, 1976]).

Curiously, the demographic factors responsible for these continuities have also, over the past century, generated discontinuities in the timing of such life course transitions as movement into and out of family roles and work roles. Here they are closely related to the gradual segmentation of the life course into societally acknowledged stages: childhood, youth, adolescence, adulthood, middle age, and old age (Kett, 1977; Hareven, 1976; Fischer, 1977; Keniston, 1971; Neugarten, 1968). The most significant expression of such discontinuities had been in the timing of the complex of activities involved in making the transition to adulthood, especially leaving home, marriage, family formation and parenthood. As Modell, Furstenberg and Hershberg have shown (1976), age uniformity in the timing of such transitions has become increasingly more marked and the transitions have been more rapidly timed and abrupt. In the nineteenth century the time in which a cohort accomplished such transitions varied. In the twentieth century, transitions to adulthood have become more uniform, orderly in sequence and definitive. The very notion of embarking on a new stage, and the implications of movement from one stage to the next, has become more generally recognized.

Two important discontinuities have emerged in the middle and later years of life: the "empty nest" in a couple's middle age and mandatory retirement in their old age. The combination of earlier marriage and fewer children overall, segregation of childbearing to the early stages of the family cycle and children's more uniformly leaving home earlier in their parents' lives, has resulted in a more widespread emergence of the empty nest as a characteristic of middle and old age (Glick, 1977). In the nineteenth century, later age at marriage, higher fertility, and shorter life expectancy rendered different family configurations from those characterizing contemporary society. Thus, for large families, the parental stage, with children remaining in the household, extended over a longer period of time, sometimes over the parent's entire life.

Since children in families were spread along a broad age spectrum younger children could observe their older siblings and near relatives moving through adolescence and into adulthood. Older siblings in turn trained for adult roles by acting as surrogate parents for younger siblings. Only a small number of adults lived alone, and the family as well as the larger society experiences a greater integration among age groups.

In contemporary society, by contrast, the post-parental period comprises one-third or more of the married adult life span (Glick, 1977). Glick concludes that the period of the empty nest has increased over the past eighty years by eleven years (from 1.6 years to 12.3 years): "The couple now entering marriage has the prospect of living together 13 years without children or more than one-third of the 44 years of married life that lay ahead of them at the time of marriage" (Glick, 1977:9). Growing sex differentials in mortality above age fifty have dramatically increased the ratio of females to males and have made widowhood a more important facet of women's lives. Uhlenberg (1978) has noted that the major change since the late nineteenth century has not so much been in the emergence of an empty nest but rather in the proportion of a woman's lifetime that this stage encompasses.

These developments are related in a larger context to the segmentation of the life course into specific developmental stages. This process has involved the gradual societal recognition of new stages of life and their integration into the experience of everyday life. It became publicly recognized through the passing of legislation and the establishment of public institutions and agencies for the realization of the potential of people at a specific stage of life and for their protection within those stages. To the extent that it is possible to reconstruct a historic model, it appears that the "discovery" of a new stage of life is itself a complex process. First, individuals become aware of new characteristics in their private experience. The articulation of such a stage and of the conditions unique to it is then formulated by the professionals, and eventually recognized in the popular culture. Finally, if the conditions peculiar to this stage seem to be associated with a major social problem, it attracts the attention of public agencies, and its needs and problems are dealt with in legislation and in the establishment of institutions. Those public activities in turn affect the experience of individuals going through such a stage, and clea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures and Tables
• About the Editor and Authors
• Introduction
• PART 1. DISCIPLINARY APPROACHES
• 1 The Life Course and Aging in Historical Perspective
• 2 Biography, Autobiography and the Life Course
• 3 Mental Health Across the Family Life Cycle
• 4 A Demographic Approach to the Life Cycle
• PART 2. DISCIPLINES AND EXEMPLARY POPULATIONS
• 5 The Life Course of College Professors and Administrators
• 6 Structure and Dynamics of the Individual Life Course
• 7 Terman's Gifted Women: Work and the Way They See Their Lives
• 8 Life History Among the Elderly: Performance, Visibility and Re-Membering
• PART 3. CONCLUSION
• 9 Mathematics and the Poetry of Human Life and Points In-Between
• Index