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ABSTRACT
The life course perspective, an emerging interdisciplinary perspective, has potential for helping social workers bridge their micro and macro worlds. This article provides an overview of the empirical and theoretical roots of the life course perspective and its basic concepts and major themes. Five basic concepts are defined and discussed: cohorts, transitions, trajectories, life events, and turning points. Six major themes that are emerging from interdisciplinary research are examined: interplay of human lives and historical time, timing of lives, linked or interdependent lives, human agency in making choices, diversity in life course trajectories, and developmental risk and protection. Strengths and limitations of the perspective for use by social workers are discussed and connections are made to narrative approaches to practice.
A decade ago, Carel B. Germain (1994) recommended the emerging interdisciplinary life course perspective as a more useful perspective for social workers than traditional life-cycle models of human development. She argued that the life course perspective does a better job of accommodating human diversity than does life-cycle models, which she criticized as assuming "universal, fixed, sequential stages of individual and family development" (p. 259). With further research and theoretical refinement in the past decade, the life course perspective holds promise for bridging the micro and macro worlds of social workers as well (for a more detailed discussion of the life course perspective, see Hutchison, 2003).
The life course perspective, which has been emerging over the past 40 years, locates individual and family development in cultural and historical contexts. It is being created from the independent work, and more recently, the collaborative work, of sociologists, anthropologists, social historians, demographers, and psychologists. Glen Elder, Jr., a sociologist, was one of the early authors of a life course perspective and continues to play a central role in its ongoing development. In the early 1960s, as he examined several decades of data from three pioneering longitudinal studies of children, Elder was impressed with the strong impact of the economic conditions of the Great Depression of the 1930s on individual and family pathways (Elder, 1974). He noted the failure of existing theories to consider the important influence of the "ever-changing historical context" (Elder, 1998, p. 1) on developmental pathways, and he called for developmental theory and research that...