what does life course mean

Definition of Life Course (noun) The entirety of individual’s life from birth to death and the typical set of circumstances an individual experiences in a given society as they age. Life Course Pronunciation

Full Answer

What are the five stages of the life course?

Key Takeaways

• The four stages of the life course are childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age. Socialization continues throughout all these stages.
• What happens during childhood may have lifelong consequences. ...
• Social location in society—social class, race and ethnicity, and gender—affects how well people fare during the stages of the life course.

What does life course mean?

life-course An expression denoting an individual's passage through life, analysed as a sequence of significant life-events, including birth, marriage, parenthood, divorce, and retirement.In much modern soci-demographic literature, the term life-course has replaced that of life-cycle in analysing these sequences of events, because the former carries fewer normative implications than the latter.

What is the definition of life course?

Life Course. [ sociology] A culturally defined sequence of age categories that people are normally expected to pass through as they progress from birth to death. Included in the cultural conceptions of the life course is some ideas of how long people are expected to live and ideas about what constitutes 'premature' or 'untimely death'.

What is life course?

Definition of Life Course ( noun) The entirety of individual’s life from birth to death and the typical set of circumstances an individual experiences in a given society as they age. Life Course Pronunciation Pronunciation Usage Guide Syllabification: life course Audio Pronunciation – American English – British English Phonetic Spelling

What means life course?

New Word Suggestion. [ sociology] A culturally defined sequence of age categories that people are normally expected to pass through as they progress from birth to death.

What is an example of life course theory?

Examples include: an individual who gets married at the age of 20 is more likely to have a relatively early transition of having a baby, raising a baby and sending a child away when a child is fully grown up in comparison to his/her age group.

What is meant by life course perspective?

The life course perspective or life course theory (LCT) is a multidisciplinary approach to understanding the mental, physical and social health of individuals, which incorporates both life span and life stage concepts that determine the health trajectory.

What are the life course stages?

The four stages of the life course are childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age. Socialization continues throughout all these stages.

What is the other term of life course?

curriculum vitae; path of life; course of life; biography.

What is family life course?

Definition. The notion of the family life cycle suggests that the ways in which families change over time are characterized by a cyclical pattern, while the concept of the life course pays particular attention to the individual life trajectory as a person moves through different roles and experiences.

What are the five principles of the Life Course Theory?

Life course theory has five distinct principles: (a) time and place; (b) life-span development; (c) timing; (d) agency; and (e) linked lives. We used these principles to examine and explain high-risk pregnancy, its premature conclusion, and subsequent mothering of medically fragile preterm infants.

Is life course one word?

Definition of Life Course (noun) The entirety of individual's life from birth to death and the typical set of circumstances an individual experiences in a given society as they age.

What are the characteristics of the life course approach?

Several fundamental principles characterize the life course approach. They include: (1) socio-historical and geographical location; (2) timing of lives; (3) heterogeneity or variability; (4) "linked lives" and social ties to others; (5) human agency and personal control; and (6) how the past shapes the future.

What factors influence our life course?

In this perspective, each life stage exerts influence on the next stage; social, economic, and physical environments also have influence throughout the life course. All these factors impact individual and community health.

Why is the life course perspective important?

2. The life course perspective recognizes the influence of historical changes on human behavior. 3. The life course perspective recognizes the importance of timing of lives not just in terms of chronological age, but also in terms of biological age, psychological age, social age, and spiri- tual age.

What are the 7 stages of human life?

Life Cycle of Human Pregnancy: The sperm from the adult male human and the egg from the adult female human form a zygote inside the uterus of the female. ... Infancy: ... Toddler years: ... Childhood: ... Adolescence: ... Adulthood: ... Middle age: ... Old age:

Are we missing a good definition for life course? Don't keep it to yourself..

The ASL fingerspelling provided here is most commonly used for proper names of people and places; it is also used in some languages for concepts for which no sign is available at that moment.

Definitions & Translations

Get instant definitions for any word that hits you anywhere on the web!

What is life course theory?

Life course theory, more commonly termed the life course perspective, refers to a multidisciplinary paradigm for the study of people's lives, structural contexts, and social change. This approach encompasses ideas and observations from an array of disciplines, notably history, sociology, demography, developmental psychology, biology, and economics. In particular, it directs attention to the powerful connection between individual lives and the historical and socioeconomic context in which these lives unfold. As a concept, a life course is defined as "a sequence of socially defined events and roles that the individual enacts over time" (Giele and Elder 1998, p. 22). These events and roles do not necessarily proceed in a given sequence, but rather constitute the sum total of the person's actual experience. Thus the concept of life course implies age-differentiated social phenomena distinct from uniform life-cycle stages and the life span. Life span refers to duration of life and characteristics that are closely related to age but that vary little across time and place.

What is life course perspective?

The life course perspective has been applied to several areas of family inquiry in North America (particularly in the United States ), as well as inter-nationally. Although space limitations do not permit full coverage of this vast body of work, several studies are highlighted to illustrate recent applications of the approach. In the United States, researchers have adopted this framework to investigate: men's housework (Coltrane and Ishii-Kuntz 1992); the timing of marriage and military service (Call and Teachman 1996); work history and timing of marriage (Pittman and Blanchard 1996); families, delinquency and crime (Sampson and Laub 1993) as well as many other substantive areas (Price et al. 2000).

What are the elements that affect the ability to adapt to life course change?

Moreover, the ability to adapt to life course change can vary with the resources or supports inherent in these elements in the form of economic or cultural capital (e.g., wealth, education ) or social capital (e.g., family social support).

What are the principles of life course?

They include: (1) socio-historical and geographical location; (2) timing of lives; (3) heterogeneity or variability; (4) "linked lives" and social ties to others; (5) human agency and personal control; and (6) how the past shapes the future.

What is the meaning of life span?

Life span refers to duration of life and characteristics that are closely related to age but that vary little across time and place. In contrast, the life course perspective elaborates the importance of time, context, process, and meaning on human development and family life (Bengtson and Allen 1993).

Why is the life course perspective important?

During this decade, rapid social change and population aging drew attention to historical influences and to the complexity of processes underlying family change and continuity. Advances in statistical techniques also prompted the continued growth of life course studies, including the creation of new methodologies to analyze longitudinal data.

Where is the life course approach used?

Furthermore, the life course approach is being used more and more in countries such as Japan (Fuse 1996) and other East Asian countries, as well as Great Britain, Germany, Italy, Norway, the Netherlands, and India.

What is the life course approach?

The life course approach, also known as the life course perspective or life course theory, refers to an approach developed in the 1960s for analyzing people's lives within structural, social, and cultural contexts. The origins of this approach can be traced back to pioneering studies of the 1920s such as Thomas' ...

What are the five principles of life course?

theorized the life course as based on five key principles: life-span development, human agency, historical time and geographic place, timing of decisions, and linked lives.

What is the meaning of life span?

Life span refers to duration of life and characteristics that are closely related to age but that vary little across time and place. In contrast, the life course perspective elaborates the importance of time, context, process, and meaning on human development and family life (Bengtson and Allen 1993).

What is the primary factor promoting standardization of the life course?

The primary factor promoting standardization of the life course was improvement in mortality rates brought about by the management of contagious and infectious diseases such as smallpox. A life course is defined as "a sequence of socially defined events and roles that the individual enacts over time".

What is life course perspective?

Lesson Summary. Life course perspective is a theory used in the social sciences that looks at how a person grows and changes over time. Researchers using this theory may study a cohort, or a group of people born during a particular timeframe who've experienced similar historical events.

What is a transition in life?

A transition occurs when there is movement from one role or status to another over time. This transition to having less money occurred because of the life event of losing a job. Getting married, getting divorced, a loved one passing away, and having a baby, along with many other changes, are all considered life events.

How do life events affect a person's trajectory?

Life events influence a person's trajectory, an overall life path that involves multiple transitions. For a person growing up during the Depression, it was common for there to have been a certain trajectory prior to the economic downturn, and then a different trajectory afterwards.

Are we missing a good definition for course of life? Don't keep it to yourself..

The ASL fingerspelling provided here is most commonly used for proper names of people and places; it is also used in some languages for concepts for which no sign is available at that moment.

Definitions & Translations

Get instant definitions for any word that hits you anywhere on the web!

Historical Development

Key Principles and Concepts

• Several fundamental principles characterize the life course approach. They include: (1) socio-historical and geographical location; (2) timing of lives; (3) heterogeneity or variability; (4) "linked lives" and social ties to others; (5) human agency and personal control; and (6) how the past shapes the future. Each of these tenets will be described...

See more on encyclopedia.com

Selected Research Applications

Bibliography