Understanding The Life Course

Understanding the Life Course provides a uniquely comprehensive guide to the entire life course from an interdisciplinary perspective. Combining important insights from sociology and psychology, the book presents the concept's theoretical underpinnings in an accessible style, supported by real-life examples. From birth and becoming a parent, to death and grieving for the loss of others, Lorraine Green explores all stages of the life course through key research studies and theories, in conjunction with issues of social inequality and critical examination of lay viewpoints. She highlights the many ways the life course can be interpreted, including themes of linearity and multidirectionality, continuity and discontinuity, and the interplay between nature and nurture. The second edition updates key data and includes additional material on topics such as new technologies, changing markers of transitions to adulthood, active ageing, resilience and neuropsychology. This comprehensive approach will continue to be essential reading for students on vocational programmes such as social work and nursing, and will provide thought-provoking insight into the wider contexts of the life course for students of psychology and sociology.

Building Health Throughout the Life Courseelucidates how health develops and changes throughout the life course, and how the use of the life course approach among public health practitioners can ensure that health as a human right is achieved for all individuals. It describes the life course vision of health that focuses not only on diseases and their consequences, but rather on achieving long, healthy, active, and productive lives. The book consists of three stand-alone parts. Part 1, "Concepts", aims to illuminate the complexity of health through the understanding of the life course approach. It can be used to familiarize oneself with the evolution and meaning of the life course, which serves as a basis for effective public health practice. Part 2, "Implications", identifies the implications for the operationalization of the life course approach in public health. It translates the technical language of the life course literature to understand how the application of the life course approach requires changes in health systems, policies, research, and practice. Part 3, "Application in Public Health", identifies key opportunities to strengthen the adoption of the life course approach in public health practice. It describes concrete, evidence-based actions to improve health and well-being through the promotion and generation of skills throughout the life course. This book aims to help decision-makers and public health professionals to understand the life course meaning and concepts, which is essential to comprehend how health develops and changes throughout the life course. The book also describes how the life course model allows us to address health disparities by generating mechanisms to improve health and well-being by promoting the vision of health as the product of a series of experiences that contribute to or detract from health in the near and long term.

Invitation to the Life Course: Toward New Understandings of Later Life discusses in depth the challenges of age, time, and social contexts for the study of aging and later life. Understanding aging (as a process) and later life (as a period) must be accompanied by serious attention to the life course. This brings significant challenges related to time, as gerontologists must describe and explain life patterns over many decades. It also brings significant challenges related to place, as gerontologists must examine how social contexts structure pathways into and through later life, and how those contexts affect the nature and meaning of experiences along the way. This book is a natural extension of the editor's previous work, ""Lives in Time and Place: The Problems and Promises of Developmental Science"" (Baywood, 1999).

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.

Current debates in life course studies increasingly reference theories of individualization, standardization, and differentiation in the structure of the life course. This volume brings together leading scholars from a variety of fields to assess the theoretical underpinnings, the empirical evidence, and the implications of existing arguments. The contributions include comparative-historical work, demographic analysis, and detailed survey research. The topics covered include historical, cross-cultural, and racioethnic variation in the transition to adulthood, the school-to-work transition, educational careers, retirement, activity characteristics over the life span and the life course context of psychological well-being. The various contributions expand our understanding of the contemporary life course and its implications. The authors offer innovative theoretical and methodological approaches that demonstrate the utility of holistic approaches to conceptualizing the life course and understanding its implications for modern society.

The life course method compares an individual's long-life and late-life behaviors to gauge one's mental decay. Arguing the life course approach is the best and simplest model for tracking mental development, Lawrence J. Whalley unlocks the mysteries of brain functionality, illuminating the processes that affect the brain during aging, the causes behind these changes, and effective coping strategies. Whalley identifies the genetic factors that determine the pace of aging and the behaviors, starting in childhood, that influence how we age. Through vignettes, charts, and tables, he composes an accessible book for patients, family members, and caretakers struggling to make sense of a complex experience.

Over the last four decades the sociological life course approach with its focus on the interplay of structure and agency over time life course perspective has become an important research perspective in the social sciences. Yet, while it has successfully been applied to almost all fields of social inquiry it is much less used in research studying migrant populations and their integration patterns. This is puzzling since understanding immigrants’ integration requires just the kind of dynamic research approach this approach puts forward: any integration theory actually refers to life course processes. This volume shows fruitful cross-linkages between the two research traditions. A range of studies are presented that all apply sociological life course concepts to research on migrants and migrant groups in Europe. The book is organized thematically, indicating different important domains in the life course. Using a wide variety of methodological approaches, it covers both quantitative studies based on population census data and survey material as well as qualitative studies based on interviews. Attention is paid to the life courses of those who migrated themselves as well as their offspring. The studies cover different European countries, relating to one national context or a particular local setting in a city as well as cross-country comparisons. Overall the book shows that applying the sociological life course approach to migration and integration research may advance our understanding of immigrant settlement patterns as well as further develop the life course perspective

Across the life course, new forms of community, ways of keeping in contact, and practices for engaging in work, healthcare, retail, learning and leisure are evolving rapidly. This book examines how developments in smart phones, the Internet, cloud computing, and online social networking are redefining experiences and expectations around growing older in the twenty-first century. Drawing on contributions from leading commentators and researchers across the world, this book explores key themes such as caregiving, the use of social media, robotics, chronic disease and dementia management, gaming, migration, and data inheritance, to name a few.