Human development and social change: an emerging perspective on the life course

Abstract

The life course perspective is temporal and contextual in the sense that it locates people and family members in history through birth years and in the life course through the social meaning of age (i.e. age-graded events and social roles). From this perspective multiple factors contribute to the shape of human growth and development linkages between social change and lives provide microtheories or explanations regarding the influence of social change and people represent both the agent and consequence of their changing life paths. This chapter presents the authors research on the stressful antecedents of childrens problem behaviors in the 1930s and on their life-course implications of the Social Change Project. It 1st describes the preliminary studies based on the Oakland Growth Study at the Institute of Human Development University of California Berkeley and then it describes current work on the Berkeley Guidance sample. The paper concludes by offering general integrative observations about linkages between social change and human development.