what is life course theory elder and shanahan

G. Elder, M. Shanahan Published 1 June 2007 Psychology The life course paradigm has replaced child-based, growth-oriented (“ontogenetic”) accounts of the person with models that emphasize the timing, social context, and organization of lives from birth to death.

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What is the 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.

Who wrote the book Life Course and Human Development?

Elder, G. H. Jr. 1998. The Life Course and Human Development. In R.M. Lerner (ed.) Volume1: Theories of Human Development: Contemporary Perspectives in William Damon (editor-in-chief), The Handbook of Child Psychology, 5 th edition New York: Wiley. Elder, G. H., Jr. & M. J. Shanahan. 2006.

What is the difference between life course and life span?

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.

Is the life course approach an emerging paradigm?

By the end of the twentieth century, the life course approach was commonly considered an "emerging paradigm" (Rodgers and White 1993) with both a distinctive theory and methods.

What is life course theory by Elder?

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.

What is life course theory?

Overview. Life course theory (LCT) is an emerging interdisciplinary theory that seeks to understand the multiple factors that shape people's lives from birth to death, placing individual and family development in cultural and historical contexts.

What are the three life course theories?

Three types of time are central to a life course perspective: individual time, generational time, and historical time (Price, McKenry, and Murphy 2000).

What is life course theory example?

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 does life course refer to?

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.

What are the five stages of the life course?

However, socialization continues throughout the several stages of the life course, most commonly categorized as childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age.

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 spiritual age.

When was life course theory created?

1960sLife course theory has evolved since the 1960s through programmatic efforts to address such issues. transitions, from the early years to later life. and Baltes (1979), and Rutter (1988). @ 1998 by the Society for Research in Child Development, Inc.

What is the causes of life course theory?

There are four central themes of the life-course paradigm: the interplay of human lives and historical times; the timing of lives; linked or interdependent lives; and human agency in making choices.

What is an example of life course theory criminology?

For example, all offenders do not necessarily start offending at one particular point in time, continue offending for some duration, completely quit (desist) at another particular point in time, and never offend again.

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.

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 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 is transition in psychology?

A transition is a discrete life change or event within a trajectory (e.g., from a single to married state), whereas a trajectory is a sequence of linked states within a conceptually defined range of behavior or experience (e.g., education and occupational career).

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.

How does the past shape the future?

How the past shapes the future. Finally, another hallmark of this perspective is that early life course decisions, opportunities, and conditions affect later outcomes. The past, therefore, has the potential to shape the present and the future, which can be envisioned as a ripple or domino effect.

Abstract

Today, the life course perspective is perhaps the pre-eminent theoretical orientation in the study of lives, but this has not always been the case. The life histories and future trajectories of individuals and groups were largely neglected by early sociological research.

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What is life course theory?

course perspective, refers to a multidisciplinary. paradigm for the study of people’s lives, structural. contexts, and social change. This approach en-. compasses ideas and observations from an array of. disciplines, notably history, sociology, demogra-.

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 are transitional events?

transitional events (for example, when to marry or. to have children). Research conducted in the 1970s. and 1980s continued to incorporate these themes, as well as to focus attention on historical changes. in life patterns, the consequences of life course ex-. periences (such as the Great Depression) on sub-.

Citation

Elder, G. H., Jr., & Shanahan, M. J. (2006). The Life Course and Human Development. In R. M. Lerner & W. Damon (Eds.), Handbook of child psychology: Theoretical models of human development (p. 665–715). John Wiley & Sons Inc.

Abstract

This chapter begins with a historical review of the study of the life course and human development, which flourished during the closing decades of the twentieth century, extending across substantive and theoretical boundaries (Mortimer & Shanahan, 2003). It now appears in many subfields of the behavioral sciences.

What is the life course perspective?

Today, the life course perspective is perhaps the pre-eminent theoretical orientation in the study of lives, but this has not always been the case. The life histories and future trajectories of individuals and groups were largely neglected by early sociological research. In the pioneering study, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918-1920), W. I. Thomas (with Florian Znaniecki) first made use of such histories and trajectories and argued strongly that they be investigated more fully by sociologists. By the mid-1920s, Thomas was emphasizing the vital need for a “longitudinal approach to life history” using life record data (Volkart, 1951, p. 593). He advocated that studies investigate “many types of individuals with regard to their experiences and various past periods of life in different situations” and follow “groups of individuals into the future, getting a continuous record of experiences as they occur.” Though this advice went unheeded for decades, Thomas’s early recommendations anticipated study of the life course and longitudinal research that has become such a central part of modern sociology and other disciplines.

What is the life course?

... The life-course comprises the set of socially defined events and roles individuals enact over time [19]. Within the life-course, in addition to chronological age, aging is socially and historically constructed by different life events, experiences, and social expectations which shape individual behaviours, perceptions and attitudes [20,21]. ...

What are the principles of life course?

The present study examines the five principles of the life course perspective—life span development, time and place, agency, timing, and linked lives —and their interplay on the experiences of 26 emerging adults (11 males and 15 females) during their transition from college completion into the STEM labor force in Spain. Findings derived from the in-depth interviews focus on the multilevel challenges these young people face and the set of strategies they develop to overcome them. From a gender perspective, the challenges reveal the structural inequalities (many associated with existing gender stereotypes) that women encounter throughout their educational and professional trajectory. The research also identifies how these women and men display agentic features (at a micro-level) and mobilize different types of networks (at a meso-level) to overcome this adverse structural context, especially, during the economic post-crisis in Spain.

How do rural adolescents transition to adulthood?

Rural adolescents are transitioning to adulthood in the context of growing disparities. To advance research on the social, behavioral, and contextual factors that influence rural young adult development, this study conducted a scoping review. The review sought to identify how researchers defined rural and how/which theories guided their work; how they integrated the rural context into the research design and methods; and how they used variables, concepts, and outcomes to measure rural experiences. Included articles were published between January 2009 and November 2020, included young adults ages 18–29, measured adult role achievement and/or behavioral health outcomes and reported on these outcomes for young adults, and focused on a rural sample within the United States. A systematic search of four databases resulted in 25 empirical articles for the inductive, qualitative analysis. Most studies used atheoretical approaches focusing on outcomes related to adult social roles, substance use, and mental health. Five themes emerged focused on the definitions of rural, the level of integration into the research design and method, and variables salient to the rural experience. These results reveal that future research should clearly define the rural context and better integrate the rural context into the conceptualization, design, methods, and implications of the empirical research.

How do structural and cultural changes affect demographic patterns and individual well-being in the context of China?

This dissertation aims to describe the processes and mechanisms of how structural and cultural changes intertwine and affect demographic patterns and individual well-being in the context of China. It takes a multi-level perspective and is comprised of three empirical chapters. The first (Chapter 2) seeks to understand how macro-level structural and cultural changes shape elders’ perceptions of aging over time. This study uses a seven-wave panel survey spanning over 16 years and presents multi-level growth curve models. It focuses on describing inter- and intra-cohort variation in elders’ perceptions of aging. The results show compelling evidence of cohort and age effects. Specifically, elders in more recent cohorts exhibit both higher levels of unhappiness with age and feelings of uselessness with age. Net of cohort effects, elders feel increasingly less happy and less useful as they move through the life course. Subsequent models that adjust for time-varying and time-invariant covariates reveal that cohort effects are largely explained by the cohort compositional differences in education and occupation. Age effects, however, remain significant after accounting for elders’ socioeconomic status, demographic characteristics and a list of time-varying life events, such as marital status, living arrangements, and residential relocation status. The second empirical chapter (Chapter 3) moves the focus from the national to sub-national level. It examines transition into adulthood experiences among a group of rural youth in one of the most impoverished provinces in China — Gansu Province. This chapter seeks to understand the roles that youths’ structural resources and agentic orientations play in shaping their transition pathways in three life domains: school, work, and home-leaving. Data came from wave 1 (2000) and wave 4 (2009) of Gansu Survey of Children and Family (GSCF). Latent class analysis (LCA) is used to identify youth’s transition pathways from age 12 to 19. The analysis revealed six distinctive transition pathways into adulthood. The subsequent multinomial analysis distinguishes three sets of variables that correlate with youth’s transition pathways: family socioeconomic status, community-level educational opportunities, and youth’s agentic orientations. The third empirical chapter (Chapter 4) examines how the dynamic interplay of economic conditions, fertility policies, and fertility norms at the local level manifested as spatial heterogeneities of fertility patterns at the macro level. Using geocoded 2010 county-level census data, this chapter estimates Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) models to identify place-specific relationships between county-level Total Fertility Rates (TFR) and economic, policy and fertility norm-related factors. The results show that the relationships between TFR and widely used economic, policy and norm-related factors vary spatially in terms of direction, strength, and magnitude. The differences and the complexities of localities cannot be told by a single story of either government intervention or socioeconomic development. In short, results from this dissertation demonstrate utilities in adopting life course and spatial thinking in the study of interactions between structure and culture. It also highlights the necessities of accounting for population heterogeneity in the study of social change.

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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...

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