Abstract
The notion that the life course is both biologically based and also socially and culturally constructed can be traced back to a number of theoretical traditions in sociology and psychology in the early part of the last century (Mannheim, 1944; Thomas, 1937), while efforts to develop a theory of the life course began several decades later with the writings of C. Wright Mills (1959), Norman Ryder (1965), and Riley, Johnson, and Foner (1972) in sociology and Bernice Neugarten (1968) in psychology. These ideas were promoted and advanced by a variety of researchers in the 1970s and 1980s among them Glen Elder (1974, 1975), Tamara Hareven (1978), Modell, Furstenberg, and Hershberg (1976; 1989), Karl Ulrich Mayer (1991), Hagestad and Neugarten (1985), Walter Heinz (1996), and many others. With new methods and longitudinal data sets, life course research came of age in the last several decades and is now an established theoretical perspective in sociology and developmental psychology as is attested to in this volume.
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Furstenberg, F. (2003). Reflections on the Future of the Life Course. In: Mortimer, J.T., Shanahan, M.J. (eds) Handbook of the Life Course. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-306-48247-2_30
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