Methods of Life Course Research : Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches, by Glen H. Elder, Jr., and Janet Ziele, Eds., Sage Publications, 1998. ISBN: 0761914374 (paperback), 0761914366 (hardback)

Foreward
Crafting Life Course Studies
Anne Colby

In addition to grappling with some of the central conceptual issues in life course research and its development as a field, this book serves as a comprehensive and practical handbook, to be consulted over and over by anyone conducting research who takes seriously the interconnectedness of the various eras of the life course. Its importance rests on the tremendous impact on social science that the life course approach has had in the past three decades. This approach has affected several disciplines and many fields of study, bringing a developmental perspective to issues that had been conceived in terms of cross-sectional slices of life and bringing a greater awareness of social and historical contexts to developmentalists. Fields that would not have been developmental in focus at all came to look at lives over time. The study of particular developmental periods began to take seriously the groundwork laid earlier in life and the outcomes to emerge later. As the editors say in their introductory chapter (Chapter 1), "Any point in the life span must be viewed dynamically as the consequence of past experience and future expectation" (p.19). Equally important is the recognition that individual and social change are interconnected through mutual influence.

The impact of the life course/life span approach has itself taken time to develop. The framework was controversial when it was introduced in the 1960s and continues to be for some time. The reasons for this were different in different disciplines and subdisciplines, and communication was sometimes impeded by the difficulty of translating ideas across fields. The emphasis on human plasticity and on the historical contingency of age-related patterns called into question the regularities and continuities in development that many observers had documented. To some extent, this simply reflected new findings yielded by better research methods. However, the debate arose from miscommunication due to different ways of using some of the same terms. For example, one use of the term "development" (generally favored by sociologists) focuses on temporal norms and expectations related to age, life stage, and social transitions, whereas others (most of whom are developmental psychologists) reserve the term for regularities in ontogenetic changes indicating increasing complexity, functional adequacy, and sophistication within a specified domain. These two are quite different, as are their relationships to historical changes in age norms for common life events. Another of the several controversies stimulated by the life course approach concerned development in adulthood about which some theorists were skeptical. This debate was also tied to the complexities of defining exactly what constitutes development.

For reasons that have more to do with the influence of cross-cultural research than of life-course research, there has been a move away from universal stages of development within psychology. Over the past decade or so, the field has moved to a more contextual view of adaptation that is more consistent with the core principles of the life course perspective. Thus, the claim that the form of development is (at least to some extent) historically and culturally contingent and that adaptation takes different forms depending on the social context no longer is as controversial as it once was.

Now the controversies surrounding the introduction of the life course approach are mostly forgotten, and the approach is widely seen as providing an accepted set of background assumptions that guide and provide common ground for research on a great number of issues across virtually all of the social sciences. Younger readers may find obvious and surprising insights such as the historical and social embeddedness of development, the fallacy of using cross-sectional data on different cohorts to assess change within individuals. the potential for development across life, the importance of human agency and the bidirectional relationship between individuals and their settings, and the plasticity of human behavior. It is important to remember, however, that the widespread acceptance of these positions has been hard won. In fact, I believe that the establishment of this approach, which is widely shared internationally as well as across disciplines, is one of the most important achievements of social science in the second half of the 20th century. It is, therefore, very appropriate that this book appears now, as the century draws to a close.

Unfortunately, these insights are considerably easier to appreciate than to operationalize, and the actual practice of life course research has lagged behind the conceptual advances. This is so in part because the designs most suited to life course study -- such as long-term longitudinal studies, cohort-sequential designs, and the comparative study of cohort subgroups -- are resource-intensive methods.

There are several ways in which to mitigate this problem of collecting and reconstructing relevant research data on the life course. One way is to collect biographical history at a single point in time and at repeated intervals. Another is to find and resurvey individuals who were studied at an earlier point in time.

A third strategy that is particularly promising but that has been developed only recently is to use existing archival data sets. Using archival data can provide a great advantage in the implementation of life course research, but many investigators are unfamiliar with the techniques needed to fruitfully mine archival data. Of course, if a goal of one's research is to illuminate the impact of historical context on the life course, then using data collected in the past is almost unavoidable. Elder's (1974) ground-breaking study, Children of the Great Depression, is a well-known exemplar of this approach. Of course, longitudinal research, even cohort-sequential studies, can be and often is conducted without the use of archival data. But given the great deal of time and money that this type of study requires, it is greatly advantageous if one can find an existing data source on which to build.

Several chapters demonstrate the value of existing data sets such as the Gluecks' study of delinquency and the Berkeley and Oakland studies of children born in the 1920s. Especially useful are those that include open-ended material that can be recoded and recast in terms consistent with the investigators' new research questions. Giele and Elder, in their opening chapter (Chapter 1), and a number of other authors in this book point to the importance of archival data sources for their works, mentioning some of the well-known longitudinal studies that represent another unique achievement of social science in the past half century.

Many of these landmark studies are archived at the Murray Research Center at Radcliffe College, where several authors in this book have done research. Like the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social research at the University of Michigan, the Murray Research Center is a national archive of social science data sets, especially longitudinal studies, but it is distinctive in being the only data bank in the United States that offers a wide range of data sets with the original qualitative records. It also is unique in that samples from many of the studies it holds are available for further follow-up by the new investigators. The use of existing data sets also allows for the addition of a new cohort to a single cohort longitudinal study or for the integration of two data sets into a multicohort study.

For such archives to be maximally useful, there must be provision for organizing and documenting the data carefully and for assisting researchers in learning how to use archival data. Instruction is needed because methods for secondary analysis, especially secondary analysis of qualitative data, are unfamiliar to many researchers and not taught in most graduate study programs.

In addition, the availability of data cannot alone drive the research. To recast an archive or collect relevant new data, the life course researcher needs to begin by both specifying a problem and by understanding how to organize the data using key concepts such as events, timing, the impact of historical period, and the distinctive experience of particular cohorts. The crucial phase of problem specification can be done in a variety of ways, as shown in several chapters here that, for example, focus on the ups and downs of life satisfaction, success in adult life, or times when an innovation has occurred. Open-ended questions can also be useful as a means of capturing unanticipated insights such as the importance of Vietnam veterans in the Iowa Farm Crisis. For the historical studies conducted over the past several decades to remain active and productive sources of new insights, we need to bring to them powerful conceptual frameworks, fruitful and imaginative questions, and creative ways of operationalizing new concepts with material collected for other purposes.

This book provides theoretical insights and practical guidance that should help with every phase in this process. It is rich with lore on many aspects of the craft of conducting life course studies, how best to use and interpret life stories, conditions under which prospective and retrospective methods are most appropriate and useful, how to assess data quality, how to track study participants for longitudinal follow-up, and many aspects of the analysis and interpretation of life course data. This distinguished collection should help to ensure the continued progress of the field as we move forward into the next century.

TABLE OF CONTENTS