Life History Approach Research Articles

Differential mortality by cause of death in Norway, 1970-1985

"Data from the three Norwegian censuses of 1960, 1970 and 1990 combined with information on migration status and survival between 1970 and 1985 have permitted the estimation, through logistic modelling, of the predictive abilities of different socio-economic indicators on the risk of death by cause. The risk has also been measured for each indicator separately, according to the path followed by the individual between 1960 and 1980. The study shows very strong disparities in risk both for men and for women, as well as a moderate reduction in differences in risk by age. The study also shows, among other things, the importance of taking account of socio-economic information covering as long a period as possible and to consider the cause of death in the study of differential mortality through a life-history approach." (SUMMARY IN ENG)

Stress in the life course: a life history approach.

This article examines the relationship between stress and distress in the life course, emphasizing the time elapsed between the event and measurement of psychological distress. Stressors are conceptualized as either distal or proximal based on how recently they occurred. Distal stressors are further classified as status changes or undesirable life changes. Using a life history calendar approach, we examine stressors occurring over a 15-year-period. We explore whether distal stressors affect current depressive symptomatology above and beyond the effect of more recent stressors and how these stressors vary in frequency and affect over 3 empirically defined age groups. While some events decrease in frequency over age, others occur consistently across age groups. Most important, distal stressors significantly impact current depressive symptomatology, independent of proximal stressors. Types of distal stressors affecting depression vary over age, indicating that the stage of life at which a stressor occurs is a significant determinant of the stressor's effect on depression.

Inside and outside: minority immigrant teachers in Canadian schools

This piece emerges from a 1992‐93 study concerned with the identities and careers of racial minority teachers who have immigrated to Canada. The author uses a life history approach to examine the understandings of a group of minority teachers, of their relationships with their students and related issues concerning colleagues and administrators, their formal and informal teaching roles and assignments, and the satisfactions and frustrations they encounter in their work. The findings of this research contributes to the literature on school improvement by focusing on race and culture of both the students and teachers. The author explicates the implications of her work for policy and practice.

The experience of severe mental illness: A life history approach

In this report, severely mentally ill adults describe their experiences of long-term illness. Forty-three research participants completed Life Chart Interviews covering their personal history since the onset of their psychiatric disorder. Participants appeared to be generally reliable informants on their treatment histories. They indicated that individual learning and personal choices influenced the course of the psychiatric disorder over time, including decisions about use of treatment and environmental support. These results support the value of life-context approach to research on severe mental illness.

Continuity and Change in the Study of Family Relationships

Recent work on family life in old age may be considered in several dimensions. First, it encompasses different substantive areas: parentchild relationships, care-giving, changing family forms. Second, it involves different types of discourse, which variously reflect social policy considerations, legal and ethical debates, academic discourses and prescriptive writing for professionals and older people. A third dimension consists of methodological and theoretical variations. These include synchronic and life history approaches, quantitative and qualitative methods, positivistic and phenomenological research paradigms, and cross-cultural and historical comparisons.

Teachers Who Teach Teachers: Reflections on Teacher Education

Introduction: Learning to Teach Teachers (Anna Richert). Part I Experienced Teacher Educators Reflect on Their Development: Reflections of a Teacher Educator Working for Social Change (Ken Zeichner) Still Learning to Teach (Jean Clandinin). Part II Beginning Teacher Educators Reflect on their Development: Becoming Teachers of Teachers (Karen Guilfoyle et al) Experiencing Teaching (Stefinee Pinnegar). Part III Ways to Promote One's Development as a Teacher Educator: Teacher Educators Reflecting on Writing in Practice (Gary Knowles and Ardra Cole) Returning to the Physics Classroom (Tom Russell). Part IV Ways to Study Practice in Teacher Education: Educative Relationships with the Writings of Others (Jack Whitehead) Methods and Issues in a Life History Approach to Self-study (Ardra Cole and Gary Knowles). Part V Broader Perspectives on Teacher Educator's Work: Themes, Processes and Trends in Professional Development of Teacher Educators (Lya Kremer-Hayon and Ruth Zuzovsky) Towards Rigour with Relevance: How Can Teachers and Teacher Educators Claim to Know? (Hugh Munby and Tom Russell). Part VI Epilogue: Teachers Who Teach Teachers: Some Final Considerations (Fred Korthagen and Tom Russell).

Risk factors for Barrettʼs oesophagus

Little is known about the aetiology of Barrett's oesophagus, a condition in which columnar epithelium replaces normal squamous epithelium above the juncture of the oesophagus with the stomach. An exploratory retrospective study of males from the Tucson Veteran's Affairs Medical Center (Tucson, AZ, USA), looking at 22 Barrett's cases and 22 controls, was undertaken to: (1) determine whether risk factors previously reported for squamous oesophageal cancer were also potential risk factors for Barrett's oesophagus; and (2) explore which of several retrospectively determined dietary factors would permit maximum discrimination of Barrett's cases from controls. Because of the recognized difficulty with retrospective dietary assessment, an intensive interview-based life history approach was developed to assess behavioural factors throughout adulthood. We examined the dose-response relationship involving questions (1) and (2) separately for subjects with lesions less than or greater than 7 cm in length. A literature-based oesophageal cancer risk factor score (including use of tobacco and intakes of alcohol, fat, vitamin A, linoleic acid and protein) discriminated cases from controls. Alcohol consumption alone discriminated patients with lesions < 7 cm in length from controls, and a more complex risk factor score (including tobacco use, alcohol, fat, fruits and vegetables) discriminated patients with lesions > 7 cm in length from controls.

Childhood Stress and Family Environment

L'etude menee aupres des enfants d'un village rural sur la cote orientale de Dominique montre la relation entre le stress et la composition du groupe domestique (âge, sexe, relation intergenerationnelle, nombre de personnes). Les enfants vivant dans des foyers ou prendre soin d'eux est une attitude frequente et stable ont un niveau de cortisol modere contrairement aux enfants connaissant des evenements familiaux traumatiques

Consultation-Liaison Research: The Use of Differing Perspectives

Slavney and McHugh have discussed the four perspectives in psychiatry in respect to their strengths and weaknesses. Research in consultation-liaison psychiatry is reviewed by considering the various perspectives that such studies utilize. Early studies utilized the life story methodology and the disease model. The life history approach considers each patient as a unique subject whose developmental vicissitudes have meaningful associations. These studies were often viewed through a psychoanalytic theory. The disease model demands syndromal identification so that etiologic factors, whether biological, psychological or social, may eventually be discovered. More contemporary investigations use the dimensional measurement of intersubject differences that allow better designation of personality. The fourth perspective of motivated behavior offers a method of studying goal-directed activity such as substance abuse, eating pathology, and sleep disorders. Consultation-liaison studies using each framework are reviewed.

Caring from the point of view of a Finnish mental health nurse: a life history approach

Finnish mental health care went through a major change in the 1980s. Its institutions were being run down and there was a shift to a caring system that stresses non-institutional practices. The schooling and work of the mental health nurse had to adapt to the new situation. The purpose of my study was to describe and analyse the mental health nurse's work, i.e. caring, as it is experienced by a nurse in the preparation of long-term psychiatric patients for non-institutional care. The data consist of repeated interviews with Vuokko, who has been a mental health nurse for about 30 years and is now approaching her retirement. In the light of the data, the central features of caring are caring about and taking an overall responsibility for the patient, and teaching the patient to cope with everyday life. Caring is based on practical knowledge, the essential elements of which are intimacy and feelings.

Matching the Self: The Paradoxical Case and Life History of a Late Career Teacher/Coach

This case study focuses on a late career, male teacher/coach and reveals the multidimensionality of his life and career. It demonstrates the influence of significant career and life events, as well as the social context in which the teacher/coach works. Overall, a life history approach describes the paradox of the employment/accommodation of a veteran elementary teacher as a physical educator at the secondary school in which he coaches. This study reveals the marginality of physical education and its teachers at the secondary school level in contrast to the importance of interscholastic athletics and those who serve in varsity coaching roles. The study shows how the teacher studied is both a good-fit and a weak-fit stayer (Yee, 1990). Equally, it demonstrates how one’s conception of self (Nias, 1985) relates to professional and personal circumstance. Finally, the research demonstrates the value of and need for biographical research in sport pedagogy.

Constructing polishness, researching polish women's lives: Feminist auto/biographical accounts

Using research carried out in a Polish community in England, I argue that recent feminist literature on autobiography raises important epistemological questions for researchers writing about lives using a broad life history approach. Researchers use their own lives (their autobiographies) to understand and interpret the lives of their subjects. That is, they use their subjects' autobiographies as biographies, as information about small slices of people's lives. I consider two important questions arising from this. First is the relationship between the researcher and the account she produces of the research. That is, the textual ways in which the researcher produces an account which is ‘about’ the lives of the subjects she researches. And the second concerns the role of the researcher as a producer of what is actually ‘an’ account rather than incontestably ‘the’ account of people's lives.

Management, ‘Race’ and Gender: an unlikely alliance?[1]

AbstractStrategies used by ethnic minority women and men and white women to gain senior management positions within educational institutions were investigated using a life history approach. Participants were also asked to reflect upon institutional strategies that might operationalise equal opportunities policies. The report describes the experiences they recounted and identifies the themes, strategies and structures to which they drew attention.

Equity, Equality, and Biculturalism in the Restructuring of New Zealand Schools: A Life-History Approach

In this article, Sue Middleton draws on interview data from the initial phase of"Monitoring Today's Schools," a research project to monitor the impact of New Zealand's educational restructuring. Unlike restructuring movements in other countries,the New Zealand movement specifically included goals of social equity and cultural inclusiveness, and Middleton focuses on the reactions of parents, teachers,and administrators to the restructuring efforts surrounding these issues. After presenting a brief historical overview of the development of and debate over equity and cultural inclusiveness in New Zealand education, Middleton presents excerpts from interviews with members of three different schools' boards of trustees, which were created as part of the restructuring effort to move more authority to the local school level. She includes their reactions to the impact of social equity and cultural inclusiveness policies on their schools and their children, and concludes by describing recent developments in New Zealand education regarding these issues.

Life history: a qualitative method of research.

The life-history method of qualitative research is an alternative to empirical methods for identifying and documenting health patterns of individuals and groups. It allows the nurse researcher to explore a person's microhistorical (individual) experiences within a macrohistorical (history of the time) framework. Life-history information challenges the nurse to understand an individual's current attitudes and behaviours and how they may have been influenced by initial decisions made at another time and in another place. This paper describes a new direction in nursing research and identifies specific steps for using the life-history approach.

Understanding major life decisions: A life history approach

Life decisions of the sort that provoke major life-structural transformations provide excellent material for the analysis of ideological processes at the level of the individual personality. Over the past two decades, cognitive and behavioral approaches to decision making have obscured the symbolic, semiotic, and sociocultural processes that govern the deciding consciousness, particularly when major life involvements are at stake. Such approaches lead logically to instrumentalistic “life management” strategies which further reduce the possibility that the fantasies, desires, and meanings of particular dilemmas and decisions will be reflected upon and understood critically. The ideological processes that structure life choices “from behind our backs” are thus given free entry into one of the important spaces where subjectivity might find expression. This article presents excerpts from depth interviews with a woman struggling with autonomy issues to illustrate a critical-interpretive approach to decision making in the context of the life history.

An evolutionary perspective on the patterning of maternal investment in pregnancy

Pregnancy is thought to be a metabolically very expensive endeavor, yet investigations have produced inconsistent results concerning the responsiveness of human birth weight to maternal nutritional stress or nutritional intervention. These findings have led some researchers to conclude that fetal growth is strongly buffered against fluctuations in maternal energy balance, making the fetus in effect a "nearly perfect parasite." This buffering would appear to be a reasonable adaptive response given the high risk of morbidity and mortality associated with low birth weight. However, a life-history approach leads to the prediction that maternal investment strategies in pregnancy should be geared toward maximizing lifetime reproductive success rather than simply the success of the current pregnancy, and by extension that maternal investment strategies should vary with reproductive value. The physiology of human pregnancy in fact appears to include a number of mechanisms that protect maternal energy resources from diversion to the fetus and preserve them for future reproductive events. These mechanisms include adjustment of blood flow to the uterus and perhaps minor adjustments in gestation length, although evidence for the latter is scant. Suggestions are made for ways of investigating these maternal options.

Local Extinction in Perennial Grasslands: A Life-History Approach

A common element of many perennial grasslands, defined as an extinction-prone perennial grass, is a palatable obligate seed reproducer, producing low numbers of larger diaspores that are poorly dispersed. Such a species can become locally extinct on a regional or landscape scale in grasslands that experience both a variable rainfall, in which drought is characteristic, and sustained heavy grazing. The changes in the temporal and spatial patterns of grazing in human-influenced systems has created the possibility of local extinction. Catastrophic mortality of established populations occurs as a consequence of droughts in combination with sustained grazing, which eventually leads to the elimination of the population. Elimination of the established population is more likely to occur in semiarid than moist areas because of the greater frequency and duration of droughts. The maintenance or reestablishment of the population depends on successful recruitment, but seedling mortality is high because of intraseasonal drought and trampling. The seed bank of an extinction-prone species is rapidly eliminated if the input of seed is curtailed. These species do not form persistent seed banks because the seeds have a limited (2-3 yr) intrinsic capacity for survival when in a state of induced or enforced dormancy. Innate dormancy lasts for only a few months. Therefore, the size of the seed bank is determined primarily by the annual input of seed. But even under favorable rainfall and light grazing, 100% of seed produced can be lost to predation. Seed production can fail from drought and from the direct consumption of inflorescences. An extinction-prone species is self-dispersed and therefore poorly dispersed. The rate and scale of incidental animal dispersal are unlikely to assist in the maintenance or reestablishment of a population because of the low probability of seedling survival. The decline of an extinction-prone species under heavy grazing is compounded by the concomitant competitive influences of invasive species and unpalatable species, which both benefit from heavy grazing. Irreversible changes in the physicochemical environment may also result in local extinction, but these processes are not mutually exclusive. The autogenic model of secondary succession is inadequate for these grasslands if the present concept of local extinction is upheld.

The Life-History Approach to Physiological Ecology

In the evolutionary process, new alleles are continually being created by mutation and they either spread or, generally, disappear, according to whether they are selected for or against (Fig. 1). The key characteristic of an allele is, therefore, whether or not it will spread. This can be measured by its per capita rate of increase. For example if there are 1000 copies of an allele at time t and 1003 at time t+1, then the per capita rate of increase is approximately 3/1000 = 0 003. Strictly we should measure it as an instantaneous rate of increase, and this can be obtained as loge (1.003) = 0-002996. Clearly alleles with greatest spreading power are those with highest rates of increase. They are most likely to be able to enter a population, and once there are most likely to resist invasion by competitor alleles, assuming their superiority is not frequency dependent. Such alleles are, therefore, the likely end products of evolution. Once fixed in the population, their long-term rate of increase is, of course, necessarily zero. In summary, their properties are (a) maximum rate of increase, while at the same time (b) this rate of increase is zero. In a stable environment, these are the properties we would expect alleles to have.

Taxonomy as an Approach to Theory Development?

In outlining and sensitively examining some of the major problems of theory development in disaster studies, and in offering a coherent proposal for dealing with these problems, Kreps has performed an important service. I would underline his emphasis on a life history approach in disaster study, his characterization of disaster as a sensitizing concept, and his focus on finding ways to make theory development and testing a collective enterprise while allowing sufficient scope for individual creativity. The task of mining the archives contain decades of disaster research in order to facilitate the development of disaster theory is a challenging but important one. Kreps' sustained and thoughtful dedication to this task has already augmented our understanding of disaster response and identified promising ways of generalizing from the multitude of case studies. Altogether, I find more to agree with than to disagree with in his statement. However, I am skeptical of the value of approaching theory development by way of so great an emphasis on taxonomy. Any approach involves the careful study of case materials can produce serendipitous insights for those whose minds are flexible enough to recognize them. But I am alarmed at the proposal that taxonomy become a central preoccupation of the [International Sociological Association's Disaster Research] Committee, and also this journal.