Understanding Human Behavior Through the Life Course Perspective, Schemes and Mind Maps of Social change

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A Life Course Perspective

(SBH)

Dr Saman Waqar Dept of Public Health

Life course perspective

• Useful way to understand the relationship between time and human behavior.
• Looks at how chronological age, relationships, common life transitions, and social change shape people’s lives from birth to death.
• Characteristics of the person and the environment in which the person lives also play a part

• The life course perspective attempts to understand the continuities as well as the twists and turns in the paths of individual lives.
• It recognizes the influence of historical changes on human behavior.
• The life course perspective recognizes the importance of timing of lives not just in terms of chronological age, but also in terms of biological age, psychological age, social age, and spiritual age.
• It emphasizes the ways in which humans are interdependent and gives special attention to the family as the primary arena for experiencing and

interpreting the wider social world.

• This perspective sees humans as capable of making choices and constructing their own life journeys, within systems of opportunities and constraints.
• The life course perspective emphasizes diversity in life journeys and the many sources of that diversity.
• It also recognizes the linkages between childhood and adolescent experiences and later experiences in adulthood.

Basic Concepts of the Life Course Perspective

• Cohorts: A group of persons who were born at the same historical time and who experience particular social changes within a given culture in the same sequence and at the same age.
• Cohorts differ in size due to natural causes, policies, gender preferences and infanticides ,wars, and in and out migrations.
• These differences affect opportunities for education, work, and family life.

• Cohorts develop strategies for the special circumstances they face.
• One way to visualize the configuration of cohorts in a given society is through the use of a population pyramid.

• Each transition changes family statuses and roles and generally is accompanied by family members’ exits and entrances.
• In a college, for example, students pass through in a steady stream. Some of them make the transition from undergraduate to graduate student, and in that new status they may take on the new role of teaching or research assistant.

• Trajectories: The changes involved in transitions are discrete and bounded; when they happen, an old phase of life ends and a new phase begins.
• In contrast, trajectories involve a longer view of long- term patterns of stability and change in a person’s life, involving multiple transitions.
• We do not necessarily expect trajectories to be a straight line, but we do expect them to have some continuity of direction.

• Life Events: Significant occurrence involving a relatively abrupt change that may produce serious and long-lasting effects.
• The term refers to the happening itself and not to the transitions that will occur because of the happening.
• A transition is a more gradual change that occurs with a life event.

• Life events inventories are not finely tuned. One suggestion is to classify life events along several dimensions: “major versus minor, anticipated versus unanticipated, controllable versus uncontrollable, typical versus atypical, desirable versus undesirable, acute versus chronic.”
• Specific life events have different meanings to various individuals and to various collectivities.
• Women report more vivid memories of life events in relationships than men report.

• Three types of life events can serve as turning points: a. 1. Life events that either close or open opportunities b. 2. Life events that make a lasting change on the person’s environment c. 3. Life events that change a person’s self-concept, beliefs, or expectations

• Migration to a new country, are momentous because they qualify as all three types of events.
• Migration, whether voluntary or involuntary, certainly makes a lasting change on the environment in which the person lives; it may also close and open opportunities and cause a change in self-concept and beliefs

• When the transition is “off-time,” meaning that it does not occur at the typical stage in life
• When the transition is followed by unforeseen negative consequences.
• When the transition requires exceptional social adjustments.

Major Themes of the Life Course Perspective

1. Interplay of Human Lives and Historical Time:

• Persons born in different years face different historical worlds, with different options and constraints—especially in rapidly changing societies.
• Historical time may produce cohort effects when distinctive formative experiences are shared at the same point in the life course and have a lasting impact on a birth cohort.