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 satisfactorily by available theories These include the recognition that individual lives are influenced by their ever-changing historical context, that the study of human lives calls for new ways of thinking about their pattern and dynamic, and that concepts of human development should apply to processes across the life span Life course theory has evolved since the 1960s through programmatic efforts to address such issues

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The life course as developmental theory.

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.

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The Emergence and Development of Life Course Theory

Life-span developmental psychology involves the study of constancy and change in behavior throughout the life course. One aspect of life-span research has been the advancement of a more general, metatheoretical view on the nature of development. The family of theoretical perspectives associated with this metatheoretical view of life-span developmental psychology includes the recognition of multidirectionality in ontogenetic change, consideration of both age-connected and disconnected developmental factors, a focus on the dynamic and continuous interplay between growth (gain) and decline (loss), emphasis on historical embeddedness and other structural contextual factors, and the study of the range of plasticity in development. Application of the family of perspectives associated with life-span developmental psychology is illustrated for the domain of intellectual development. Two recently emerging perspectives of the family of beliefs are given particular attention. The first proposition is methodological and suggests that plasticity can best be studied with a research strategy called testing-the-limits. The second proposition is theoretical and proffers that any developmental change includes the joint occurrence of gain (growth) and loss (decline) in adaptive capacity. To assess the pattern of positive (gains) and negative (losses) consequences resulting from development, it is necessary to know the criterion demands posed by the individual and the environment during the lifelong process of adaptation. The study of life-span development is not a homogeneous field. It comes in two major interrelated modes. The first mode is the extension of developmental studies across the life course without a major effort at the construction of metatheory that emanates from life-span work. The second mode includes the endeavor to explore whether life-span research has specific implications for the general nature of developmental theory. The second approach represents the topic of this article. Specifically, the purpose of this article is twofold. First, after a brief introduction to the field of life-span developmental psychology, some "prototypical" features of the life-span approach in developmental psychology are presented. Second, these features are illustrated by work in one domain: intellectual development. Although the focus of this paper is on life-span developmental psychology and its theoretical thrust, it is important to recognize at the outset that similar perspectives on developmental theory have been advanced in other quarters of developmental scholarship as well (Hetherington & Baltes, in press; Scan; 1986). There is, however, a major difference in the "gestalt" in which the features of the theoretical perspective of life-span psychology are organized.

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Theoretical propositions of life-span developmental psychology : On the dynamics between growth and decline

Theoretical propositions of life-span developmental psychology: On the dynamics between growth and decline [Chinese translation]

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. The chapter begins with a story of this intellectual change from the thematic precursors of life course studies to the present. The next section identifies heuristic concepts that capture the dynamic properties of settings and contextualize the individual, including social pathways, the cumulation of experiences, trajectories and transitions, and turning points. The life course paradigm also offers core principles that link social change and developmental trajectories, including those of life-span development, human agency, timing, linked lives, and historical time and place. In combination, these principles represent key contributions to the study of human development. They establish development as a life-long phenomenon that includes aging into late adulthood; to highlight the agentic nature of people as they create and shape their settings within limits; view development as the confluence of age, the generations, and history; and situate each person's trajectory in terms of family, neighborhood, community, and society. Life course insights have been especially revealing in research on health, and offer great promise in the study of biology, experience, and adjustment.


Keywords:

social pathways;
birth cohorts;
contexts of human development;
developmental and social trajectories;
historical change;
transitions

The Life Course and Human Development.

Students of the life cycle have given much attention to the biological timetable of human development, but much less attention to the socio-historical context. A few of the major sociological concepts significant for understanding personality are briefly reviewed–namely, social system, social role, and socialization, and each is discussed in relation to a time dimension in looking at the life course. The life cycle is then viewed from each of three dimensions of time: life time (or chronological age); historical time; and social time, or the system of age grading and age expectations which shapes the life cycle. After a brief discussion of age norms as a system of social control, and of age stratification in society, there follows a description of the changing rhythm of the life cycle in American society, illustrating how historical time, social time, and life time are intertwined.

Nancy Datan

Papers

Sociological Perspectives on the Life Cycle

21. The Subjective Experience of Middle Age