The life course as developmental theory The pioneering longitudinal studies of child development (all launched in the 1920s and 1930s) were extended well beyond childhood. Indeed, they eventually followed their young study members up to the middle years and later life. In doing so, they generated issues that could not be addressed satisfa …
In conclusion, life course approaches can lead to etiologic insights into the developmental processes that generate disparities preconception, prenatally, during infancy and early childhood, through adolescence, middle adulthood, older adulthood, and across generations.
This interest has ushered in a number of methodologically sophisticated and important contributions thus far. Having said this, there is certainly room for this theoretical perspective to grow, as well as a place for continued empirical assessments on the validity of developmental/life-course theories.
Taken together, developmental/life-course theories and developmental/life-course research can still be considered to be in its relative infancy compared with more-traditional criminological theories such as social bonding (Hirschi, 1969) and social learning (Akers, 1973) theories.
It encourages greater attention to the impact of historical and social change on human behavior, which seems particularly important in rapidly changing societies. Because it attends to biological, psychological, and social processes in the timing of lives, it provides multidimensional understanding of human lives.
The life course perspective sees humans as capable of making choices and constructing their own life journeys within systems of opportunities and constraints. 6. The life course perspective emphasizes diversity in life journeys and the many sources of that diversity.
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.
The life course perspective is a holistic approach to examining the lives of people over time. It includes continuities and stability on the one hand and changes and transitions, in relationship to larger social, economic, and historical contexts that influence both continuity and change on the other [20, 21].
One limitation of the life course perspective is the significant focus on the individual rather than spending equal time and emphasis on macro influence on the life course.
Life course approaches to health disparities leverage theories that explain how socially patterned physical, environmental, and socioeconomic exposures at different stages of human development shape health within and across generations and can therefore offer substantial insight into the etiology of health disparities.
Life Course Outcomes Research Program Mission and Goals A “life course” perspective looks at the entire span of life and emphasizes challenges related to quality of life.
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.
The most complex and demanding challenge for the life course approach lies in taking a holistic view of people, including a wide range of environmental and individual risk factors and in developing means for effective interventions to reduce or modify such risk factors and behaviors during the different phases of life.
Glen Elder 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.
How does the Life Course Theory view criminality? As a dynamic process, influenced by a multitude of individual characteristics, traits, and social experiences.
An enormous body of life course research describes individual developmental trajectories (life pathways) in accordance with the sequence, impact, and cumulative influence of life events on a range of outcomes from childbearing to transition into and out of the workforce.
Using recent research from the fields of public health, medicine, human development, and social sciences, the LCHD framework shows that. Health is a consequence of multiple determinants operating in nested genetic, biological, behavioral, social, and economic contexts that change as a person develops.
The timing of experiences during physiologically sensitive periods, the relationship of health development to externally defined social transitions, and the synchronization of developmental events and transitions are likely to play an important role in health development.
This figure illustrates how risk reduction strategies can mitigate the influence of risk factors on the developmental trajectory, and how health promotion strategies can simultaneously support and optimize the developmental trajectory.
The first framework is rational choice theory (Cornish and Clarke, 1986), which attempts to explain the relationship between criminal activity and long-term access to economic opportunity. This framework assumes that offenders calculate the tradeoff between the costs and benefits of committing a crime and the long-term economic opportunities in the noncriminal job market. If an offender finds that the ability to earn legitimate wages outweighs the net payoff associated with committing more crime, then that person will become less involved in criminal activity. Theories about routine activities (Hindelang et al., 1978) also fit within the rational choice framework. These theories of crime argue that the more time a person spends with family and the longer he or she has steady employment, the less likely that person will be to commit crime.
Desistance and developmental theories focus on why there is a dramatic decrease or end in the number of crimes a person commits after adolescence. These life course frameworks are built from the foundations of theories that examine why people commit crime and then seek to answer why people stop.
The main aim of this chapter is to review the key elements of nine developmental and life-course criminology theories, focusing especially on key empirical research that has been carried out to test them. These theories aim to explain within-individual changes in offending and antisocial behavior over time.
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We are very grateful to Rico Catalano, Ben Lahey, Rolf Loeber, Marc Le Blanc, Temi Moffitt, Terry Thornberry, and P-O. Wikström for assistance with this chapter.
Farrington, D. P. (Ed.) (2005). Integrated developmental and life-course theories of offending. ( Advances in criminological theory, Vol. 14). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
The attention that the life course perspective places on the impact of historical and social change on human behavior is important because of our rapidly changing society. The life course perspective differs from other psychological theories in this way.
The life course perspective is a theoretical model that has been developing over the last 40 years across several disciplines. It is intended to look at how chronological age, common life transitions, and social change shape people’s lives from birth to death. Sociologists, anthropologists, social historians, demographers, ...
LITERATURE REVIEW OF MAJOR THEMES. In 1994, Glen Elder identified four dominant themes in the life course approach: 1) interplay of human lives and historical time, 2) timing of lives, 3) linked or interdependent lives, and 4) human agency in making choices. The literature for these themes is reviewed below, along with two other related themes ...
He found that the life course of the group that were young children at the time of the economic downturn were more seriously affected by family hardship than the group that were in middle childhood and late adolescence at the time.
The resettlement experience requires establishment of new social networks, may involve changes in socioeconomic status, and presents serious demands for assimilating to a new physical and social environment. Gender, race, social class, and age all add layers of complexity to the migration experience.
Men’s and women’s life pathways have started to become more similar, but this is primarily because women’s schooling and employment patterns are moving closer to men’s, and not because men have become more involved in the family domain (Sattersten and Lovegreen,1998).
Elder (1998) notes that the emphasis on human agency in the life course perspective has been aided by Albert Bandura’s work on the two concepts of self-efficacy and efficacy expectation, or expectation that one can personally accomplish a goal. Diversity in Life Course Trajectories.