Lifecourse perspectives on immigration

Abstract

The lifecourse perspective examines individual life histories in order to understand how prior events, social and economic conditions, and individual characteristics influence decisions and events over time. The lifecourse approach emphasizes the connection between individuals and the historical context in which their lives take place. This approach has its origins in Thomas and Znaniecki’s pioneering studies (1918–1920) of the migration and adaptation of Polish peasants in Europe and the United States (Thomas and Znaniecki 1958). Their work examined how the lives of Polish peasants changed over time within social, economic, and cultural contexts. In recent years, the lifecourse perspective has been used to study how events earlier in life—such as schooling or teenage experiences—affect later decisions and events, such as childbearing, marriage and divorce, and retirement. In early studies in the 1930s and 1940s, longitudinal studies of individuals followed children or adults only for a few years. Generally, this early work was interested in the sequence of social roles, such as childhood socialization, becoming married, or transition to parenthood—a process that demographers called life cycle studies or the study of key transitions in individual lives. Studies dealing with the life cycle were particularly prominent in family demography (Glick 1988), as evidenced by the large number of publications dealing with family trends, religious and racial intermarriage, social-economic changes and family stability, changes in age at first marriage, and the prevalence of divorce in the 1950s and 1960s. Recent studies in family demography demonstrate the continued usefulness of the life cycle for studying such topics as cohabitation outside marriage, one-parent families, gender preferences in children, nofault divorce, divorce among children of divorce, and stepfamilies. Other researchers, notably at the University of California, Berkeley’s Institute of Human Development in the 1950s, realized that the study of single individuals oversimplified the lives of people, who were interacting with others and were entrenched in a broader historical context. As longitudinal studies developed—in ways discussed below— life cycle theory was expanded to what is now called lifecourse perspective. Although the early use of a lifecourse perspective dealt with migration, very few recent studies of migration have explicitly employed a lifecourse approach. In June 2010, the Committee on Migration and Immigration of the Population Change and Lifecourse Strategic Knowledge Cluster1 organized a workshop at the University of Montreal to explore the value of a lifecourse perspective on immigration. This workshop included ten papers that dealt with a variety of immigration topics. Six papers from that workshop have been revised for publication in this special issue of Canadian Studies in Population.