I am deeply indebted to an ongoing conversation with Urie Bronfenbrenner about this essay. Thanks also to commentary by Avshalom Caspi, Michael Shanahan, Tamara Hareven, and Elizabeth Clipp. I acknowledge support by the National Institute of Mental Health (MH 41327, and MH 00567), a contract with the U.S. Army Research Institute, and research support from the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Successful Adolescent Development Among Youth in High-Risk Settings.

In the late 1920s and early 30s, Harold and Mary Jones, Jean Macfarlane, and Nancy Bayley launched their pioneering longitudinal studies. No one could have imagined at the time what the effort would mean for an emerging field of child development. From their Berkeley Institute of Child Welfare, they saw few other projects engaged in studying children over time, though much has happened since then.⁽¹⁾ This modest beginning represents a key event in the remarkable growth of longitudinal research, centered on human development across the life course.⁽²⁾
 

I first encountered these studies in the early 60s after arriving at the Institute (now called Human Development) to work with John Clausen on a study of careers. The archival data from year to year broadened my vision of lives and revealed the dramatic instability of families under changing economic conditions, the Great Depression. A good many Study members could say that they were once "well off" and then "quite poor." Institute records noted frequent changes of residence and jobs, such as they were. A child in an economically-deprived family who seemed "old beyond his time" recovered his youthful spirit when family income improved. Overall, the Depression children who did well in their adult years left many puzzles behind.

Such events focused my attention on ways of thinking about social change, life pathways, and individual development, as modes of behavioral continuity and change. These pathways represent the most distinctive area for exploration. In my view, they refer to the social trajectories of education, work, and family that are followed by individuals and groups through society. The multiple pathways of individuals and their developmental implications are basic elements of the "life course," as conceptualized in research and theory.

Historical forces shape pathways in family, school, and work, and they in turn influence behavior and particular lines of development. Some individuals are able to select the paths they follow, a phenomenon known as human agency. Such thinking prompted my study of children of the Great Depression, based on the Berkeley Institute studies, and then a series of investigations of human lives and development in different times and places -- World War II and the Korean War, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, inner-city poverty, and rural disadvantage in contemporary America.⁽³⁾ A central premise ties all of this work together; the notion that changing lives alter developmental trajectories.

This afternoon I wish to address the developmental relevance of such pathways in the life course. I begin with key findings of Children of the Great Depression and their theoretical meaning for life course study.⁽⁴⁾ Next I turn to challenges we have addressed in life course theory and explore types of transition experience, a core building block in the life course of human development.

The Institute's longitudinal data contributed to these themes by encouraging me to think holistically about lives and development over time and across changing contexts. I had to move beyond the early longitudinal projects that were known for child-based studies in single domains, such as problem behavior in the work of Jean Macfarlane (with Allen & Honzik, 1954) on the Berkeley Guidance sample.

When Harold and Mary Jones established the Oakland Growth Study (1930-31), they were interested in normal growth and development, including physical maturation. Neither developmental nor health effects of the Depression crisis were on the agenda. Over 30 years later, however, I turned to studies of children in the Great Depression and Second World War that brought more attention to contextual influences. I asked how the economic depression of the 1930s affected the subsequent development of children who had grown up in middle and working class families before the economic collapse.

Members of the Oakland Study were born at the beginning of the 20s, entered childhood during this prosperous decade, and then encountered the economic collapse as adolescents through the hardship experience of parents and relatives. Their historical location placed them at risk of this deprivational event. Some were exposed to severe hardships through the family, whereas others managed to avoid them altogether. These contrasting situations, deprived and non-deprived, established an "experiment in nature" with empirical findings that affirm (1) the principle of historical time: that the life course of individuals is embedded in and shaped by the historical times and events they experience over their lifetime.⁽⁵⁾
 

The Oakland children encountered Depression hardships after a relatively secure

phase of early development and left home after the worst years of the 30s for education, work, and family. By contrast, a comparative group, the younger Berkeley Guidance children (born 1928-29), experienced the vulnerable years of childhood during the worst years of the Great Depression, a period of extraordinary stress and instability.⁽⁶⁾ Their adolescence coincided with "empty households of World War II" when parents worked from sunup to sundown in essential industry. We found that the Berkeley children were more adversely influenced by the economic collapse than were the Oakland adolescents, especially the boys. Such life stage implications suggested (2) another principle, that of timing in lives: that the developmental impact of a life transition or event is contingent on when it occurs in a person's life.⁽⁷⁾
 

Historical events and individual experience are connected through the family and the "linked" fates of its members. The misfortune of one member is shared through relationships. For example, Depression hardship tended to increase the explosiveness of fathers who were inclined toward irritability. And the more explosive they became under economic stress, the more adversely it affected the quality of marriage and parenting. In these ways, our observations support (3) the principle of linked lives: that lives are lived interdependently and that social and historical influences are expressed through this network of shared relationships.⁽⁸⁾

The Great Depression brings to mind "a world out of control," and yet families often worked out successful adaptations in these circumstances. Parents and children made choices and some engaged in effective adaptations. I have called this human agency. Under the mounting economic pressures of their households, mothers sought and found jobs amidst scarce options, while their children assumed responsibilities in the home and community. When hard-pressed parents moved their residence to cheaper quarters and sought alternative forms of income, they were involved in the process of "building a new life course:" (4) the principle of human agency states that individuals construct their own life course through thechoices and actions they take within the constraints of history and social circumstances.⁽⁹⁾
 

In terms of contemporary knowledge, these early empirical observations already illustrate principles of life course theory.⁽¹⁰⁾ I use the term "theory" to refer to a framework and orientation (Merton, 1968). Life course theory defines a common field of inquiry by providing a framework that guides research on matters of problem identification and conceptual development. The key principles are historical time and place, the timing of lives, linked or interdependent lives, and human agency in constrained settings. Considerations of historical context and social timing enabled us to see how members of the Oakland and Berkeley cohorts were influenced differentially by their life experiences. Moreover, these influences could only be understood through the hardship adaptations of people who were important in their lives -- a dynamic of linked lives.

When work began on Children of the Great Depression in the mid-1960s, a field of life course studies or relevant theories did not exist. The concept of life course was rarely discussed in the scholarly literature. In putting together a study of children in the Great Depression, I drew upon the ideas and research of many people in the social and behavioral sciences who were beginning to work on relevant problems, such as aging. This early work thus constitutes a first report from the field on a lifetime journey.

At the time, the social contexts of human development were generally ignored. These contexts are now coming back through multi-level studies of neighborhoods and communities,⁽¹¹⁾ and this is happening as we see more studies of the developmental trajectories of children and adults. With advances in statistical models, we are now able to investigate the interplay of changing behavior and personality with changing social pathways. However, it is still the case that longitudinal studies seldom examine the stability and nature of children's social environments over time (Sameroff, 1993, p. 8). As a result, sources of behavioral continuity and change remain poorly understood.

The work to be done is daunting, to be sure, but life course ideas on time, process, and context have continued to spread throughout the social and behavioral sciences. We find examples in both ecological and life-span developmental psychology, in the new social and cultural history of family and children, and in cultural models from anthropology and the sociology of age.⁽¹²⁾ I think of this diffusion in terms of research issues that were once posed many years ago by the Berkeley longitudinal studies.

The Berkeley studies were originally designed for assessments of child development. There was no plan to follow the samples into their 20s and 30s. As they continued into adulthood and even the later years, they acquired greater theoretical significance. I see this significance in the fresh momentum they gave to the study of adult development, along with more awareness of the correlated limitations of child-based models of growth and development.

When the Study members reached adulthood, investigators had two ways of thinking about social pathways and neither placed individuals in history. One involved the notion of careers, usually over a person's worklife. The second is known as the "life cycle" -- a sequence of social roles that bear upon stages of parenthood, from the birth of children to their departure from the household and their eventual transition to the role of parent, setting in motion another life cycle.

Neither approach proved satisfactory. The career model dealt with single careers, mainly a person's worklife, and thus oversimplified the lives of people who were coping with multiple roles at the same time. The large-scale entry of mothers into the labor force produced circumstances that favored a new concept of multiple, interlocking trajectories that varied in synchronization. Career perspectives also failed to incorporate notions of age-graded expectations in a systematic way and did not orient analyses to the historical context of lives across the generations.

Life cycle theory helped to contextualize people's lives by emphasizing the social dynamic of "linked lives." These connections extend across the generations and serve to integrate young and old. Social ties to significant others become forms of social control and constraint in channeling individual decisions and actions. Socialization occurs through networks of social relationships. Though notable, these contributions of life cycle theory did not locate people according to their life stage or historical context.

To address these limitations, studies began to draw upon the insights of a deeper knowledge of age in people's lives. Age expectations include notions about the timing and order of transitions, such as entry into first grade, and about whether the events are early, on-time, or late.⁽¹³⁾ Some events are "out of order" according to conventional expectations, such as births before marriage. Ill-timed or off-timed events (too late or too early) can have adverse effects. In addition, birth year orients analysis to people in specific historical locations, and thus according to particular changes. Consider Americans who were born in the late 1930s. They avoided the generalized risk of family stress and deprivation, but faced another risk -- that of father-absence during the Second World War.

Children of the Great Depression (Elder, 1974) brought the life cycle model together with an age-based concept of timing in a framework on the life course. Neither perspective was adequate by itself. In the life cycle approach, the notion of "linked lives" enabled us to understand how Depression hardship influenced children through the family. And it proved helpful in thinking about socialization and the role sequence of adult life. But age distinctions were needed to locate families in history and to mark the transitions of adult life. The meanings of age brought a perspective on "timing" to the study.

A more recent study also shows the insights of a life course model that incorporates ideas of career, life cycle, and age. Among African American families in Los Angeles, Burton (1985) found that the timing of a young daughter's birth had repercussions well into the grandparent generation. A birth in early adolescence multiplied strains and deprivations, reflecting the violation of deep-seated expectations about "how life should be lived." The young mothers expected their own mothers to help care for their child, but this expectation seldom materialized because they felt "too young" for the grandmother role. As a mother put it, "I can't be a young momma and a grandmomma at the same time."

In this study, the birth of a child defines a life transition, but transitions are frequently a succession of choice-points. In fact, the transition to motherhood in adolescence can be thought of as a multi-phasic process in which each phase is linked to a choice point. Young girls may choose to engage in premarital sex or not, or to use contraception or not, to seek an abortion or not, and to marry the father or not. Only a handful of options lead to a birth out of wedlock. Not too long ago, unwed motherhood was viewed simply as one transition, a concept that obscured appropriate points of preventive intervention along the life course.

What are the consequences of a childbirth that occurs much too early according to expectations? One life-course interpretation stresses the cumulation of disadvantages -- a concatenation of negative events and influences. Birth of a child to an early adolescent may result in the early termination of schooling with its negative implications for employment. Whether disadvantages cumulate or not depends on the new mother's response to her circumstance. In a Baltimore longitudinal study of African American generations (Furstenberg, Brooks-Gunn, & Morgan, 1987), young mothers who could stay in school through the childcare provided by their mother or who married the father were able to minimize the long-term disadvantage of an ill-timed birth.

As life course theory advanced, it provided a framework for studies that relate social pathways to history and developmental trajectories. In any longitudinal study, the mere step of locating parents in history through their birth year can generate historical insights that would not be achieved otherwise. Consider what we have learned about Lewis Terman's sample of gifted Californians who were born between 1900 and the 1920s (Holahan & Sears, 1995). These "best and brightest" seemed to be invulnerable to the misfortunes of history, but the 20th century proved to be no respecter of their high ability (Shanahan, Elder, & Miech, 1997). Men born before 1911 ended up with college degrees and no place to go in the stagnant economy of the 30s. Their alternative in many cases was to stay in school, piling up degrees. Indeed, they ended up better educated than the younger men, but aspirations had little to do with their achievement.

Life course theory provides a way to study the myriad changes that bear upon children in today's world. These include (1) the restructuring of the economy through downsizing and other strategies, as expressed through community and family disruption and hardship; (2) the family consequences of expanding levels of economic inequality; (3) the implications of change in the welfare system for children and young families; (4) the concentration of poverty and crime in the inner-city; and (5) the redesign of schools and learning through information-age technology. All epochs of social change call for approaches to child development that view children in their changing ecologies. The motivating question focuses on the process by which a particular change is expressed in the way children think, feel, and behave.

More concepts of development are at work today in studies across the life course, and projects are assessing the developmental impact of changing pathways in changing times.⁽¹⁴⁾ The challenge involves the analysis of "interlocking trajectories" that connect changing environments with behavioral changes. Consider the following. Using growth curve models, a longitudinal study found that increasing negative life events contributed significantly to the widely documented rise in depressed feelings among girls during early adolescence, especially in the absence of parental warmth (Ge et al., 1994). No such effect was observed among boys. In another research example that parallels Children of the Great Depression (1974), a nationwide longitudinal study found that mounting economic hardship in families significantly increased the antisocial tendencies and depressed feelings of boys and girls (McLeod & Shanahan, 1996). This type of work provides merely a sampling of the new life course studies.

Transition experiences represent a strategic approach to the possibilities of studying "lives in motion." Transitions make up life trajectories and they provide clues to developmental change. The process by which this occurs is captured by the lasting effect of early transitions, my concluding topic.

Early transitions can have enduring consequences by affecting subsequent transitions, even after many years and decades have passed. They do so, in part, through behavioral consequences that set in motion "cumulating advantages and disadvantages." Individual differences are minimized in life transitions when the new circumstances resemble a "total institution" that presses from all angles toward a particular behavior (Caspi & Moffitt, 1993, pp. 265-266). One transition with such impact is military service, a common event for young men in the Oakland and Berkeley studies.

Nine out of ten males from the Oakland Growth Study served in the military as did over 70 percent of the Berkeley Guidance males, most of whom came from economically deprived households in the 30s (Elder, 1986, 1987). Veterans who entered the service immediately after high school fared better in psychological health and life achievement than nonveterans. This "early entry" occurred before adult careers and thus became a formative influence. In large part, military service accounts for why many "children of the Great Depression" did well in their lives. Three functions of the service offer essential details of this developmental process.

First, military mobilization tends to pull young people from their past, however privileged or deprived, and in doing so creates new beginnings that favor developmental change. This transition, as a Berkeley veteran noted, provided a "passage into manliness."

Second, military service establishes a clear-cut break from the age-graded career, a time-out in which to sort matters and make a new beginning. For another Berkeley veteran, the Army "was a place to be for a while, a place for sorting out self."

Third, military service offers a wide range of new experiences for personal growth from group processes, training, and travel. Almost overnight, young men were placed in demanding leadership roles. The G.I. Bill for advanced education was also part of this developmental regime.

Experiences of this kind do not exhaust all features of military service, but they collectively shaped a "developmental turning point" for youth from disadvantaged circumstances. One pathway involved situational changes that made early entrants more ambitious, assertive, and self-directed by mid-life. Another pathway led to extensive use of the educational and housing benefits of the G.I. Bill. These trajectories literally changed the kind of parents, husbands, and workers the men became. In this manner, the life change of veterans has special relevance to their children's well-being.

This study posed important questions regarding the nature of change and continuity in life-span development. Some Guidance Study men experienced dramatic change in their life course, what I describe as a "turning point." The military placed them in a total institution and the resulting change established a trajectory of greater competence.⁽¹⁵⁾ In other cases, stress symptoms persisted, especially from war combat. They may have done so through interactions with others that re-created the "trauma" situation or from the progressive cumulation of behavioral consequences. Explosiveness born of a war experience may elicit responses that legitimize and reinforce such "disruptive" dispositions.⁽¹⁶⁾

A more complete account of the change mechanisms is presented by a panel study of approximately 1000 boys from low-income areas of Boston who grew up in the 1920s and 30s (Sampson & Laub, 1996). More than 70 percent served in the military. The matched control design of delinquents and controls was originally used for a longitudinal study of delinquency by Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck (1968), pioneers in research on juvenile delinquency. Men in both samples generally entered World War II at the age of 18 or 19. Most served at least two years and overseas.

As expected, the delinquents were more involved in dishonorable discharges and other forms of official misconduct, but they were also more likely to benefit from the service over their life course, when compared to the controls. And this was especially true for men who entered the service early. These men were young enough to take advantage of such experience through in-service schooling, overseas duty, and the G.I. Bill. In particular, benefits of the G.I. Bill were notably greater for veterans with a delinquent past when they entered the service at a young age. All of these experiences enhanced occupational status, job stability, and economic well-being, independent of childhood differences and socioeconomic origins up to the middle years.

As a whole, these findings provide consistent support for "an early timing hypothesis" of military service. By contrast, persistent disadvantages appear among veterans who entered the Second World War at a very late age -- in their 30s. Effects of this kind were observed among California men in Lewis Terman's well-known study of highly able children (Elder, Shanahan, & Clipp, 1994). The older cohort of men hit both the Depression and War years at "an untimely point" in their lives. They tended to follow a path of life-long disadvantage into the later years, when compared to the younger men. They suffered more work instability, earned less income over time, experienced a higher rate of divorce, and were at greater risk of an accelerated decline in physical health by their 50s.

"Timeliness," then, represents an important determinant of enduring military influences from the 1940s and its expression in veterans' lives. The service was indeed a bridge to greater opportunity for many, given appropriate timing.

In thinking back to the early 1960s at the Berkeley Institute of Human Development, it would be difficult for any of us to appreciate the research challenge of the longitudinal studies. The Institute psychologists were students of child development at a time when the Study members were entering their middle years. Child-based models of development had little to offer research accounts of the adult years, their pathways, and turning points.

These were the kinds of issues that I recall in exchanges over case histories at the time. The childhood poverty of some adults in the Oakland Growth Study did not square with their high achievements and good health at mid-life. Jean Macfarlane (1963), director of the Berkeley Guidance Study, also noted in the early 1960s that a number of boys in the Guidance Study turned out to be more stable and productive adults than the staff had expected.

Members of the Oakland Growth and Berkeley Guidance studies are "children of the Great Depression," but the central theme of their lives is not the harsh legacy of a deprived family through enduring limitations. It is not the long arm of a Depression childhood. Rather, it is the story of how so many women and men successfully overcame disadvantage in their lives. Some rose above the limitations of their childhood through military service, others through education and a good job, and still others through the nurturing world of family.

These accomplishments amidst adversity were not gained without personal costs, a point that John Clausen (1993) has made so eloquently in American Lives. War stresses continue to reverberate through the lives of some combat veterans, though a good many have "learned to manage."⁽¹⁷⁾ Women on the homefront kept families together while working long hours. Other women survived family abuse and have coped effectively with the stresses of life. Life success can be assessed partly in these terms. Jean Macfarlane (1963, 1971) may have had this in mind some years ago when she spoke about the maturing experience of working through the pain and confusion of life.

But not even great talent and industry can ensure life success over adversity without opportunities. Talented black youth in our blighted inner-cities face this reality every day. Generations of young Chinese also learned this during the Cultural Revolution when important life decisions were made by the work unit, and many thousands were sent down from the city to the rural countryside and mines.⁽¹⁸⁾ Talented women in the Lewis Terman study discovered this lesson when they were barred from career advancement in their chosen fields. Even some Terman men found their lives going nowhere as they left college for hardtimes in the Great Depression and later were mobilized into World War II. The constraining realities of social systems are very real.

Life course theory and research alerts us to this real world, a world in which lives are lived and where people work out paths of development as best they can. It tells us how lives are socially organized in biological and historical time, and how the resulting social pattern affects the way we think, feel, and act. All of this has something important to say about our field of inquiry. Human development is embedded in the life course and historical time. Consequently, its proper study challenges us to take all life stages into account through the generations, from infancy to the grandparents of old age.

I close this presentation with an expression of gratitude to many colleagues and students who have been so important in my professional life. I am especially grateful that I could share my ideas for the essay with John Clausen before he passed away in February '96. John brought me to the Institute of Human Development and did much to enhance my accomplishments through this research organization, as did Brewster Smith and Paul Mussen, Jean Macfarlane and Marjorie Honzik, Mary Jones and Dorothy Eichorn, Jeanne and Jack Block, among others. All of us have intellectual homes and the Institute represents one of mine across the years. My professional journey has been blessed by Urie Bronfenbrenner's mentorship. It was he who insisted that I bring my work more fully into the field of developmental science. Lastly, I am indebted to the interdisciplinary vitality of the Carolina Consortium on Human Development.⁽¹⁹⁾

Thank you very much.

1. The Institute (now called Human Development) has been home to three of the older longitudinal samples: the Oakland Growth Study, formerly under the direction of the late Harold and Mary Jones (birth years 1920-21); the Berkeley Guidance Study, directed for many years by the late Jean Macfarlane (birth years 1928-29); and the Berkeley Growth Study (also 1928-29) and its long-time director, now deceased, Nancy Bayley. 

2. The growth of longitudinal studies has been documented in a number of volumes, including Nesselroade & Baltes (1979), Elder (1985), Magnusson & Bergman (1990), Rutter (1988), and Cairns, Elder, & Costello (1996). 

3. The Oakland and Berkeley cohorts were subject to the influence of other historical times, including World War II and the Korean conflict. Studies of this influence are summarized in Clipp & Elder (1996), and include Elder & Clipp (1988, 1989) and Elder (1986, 1987). In the 1980s, the return of hardtimes to rural America led to a collaboration with Rand Conger and colleagues at Iowa State University on a study of economic distress in family life and children's lives (Conger & Elder, 1994). This study now extends across four generations. At this time, inner-city poverty became an important issue and I joined the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Successful Adolescent Development among Youth in High-Risk Settings and a study of inner-city families and youth in the city of Philadelphia (see Elder, Eccles, Ardelt, & Lord, 1995; Furstenberg, Eccles, Elder, Cook, & Sameroff, forthcoming). One of the important questions in life course studies is whether one can use retrospective life history methods to good effect in recovering knowledge about the enduring effects of past events. With financial support from the Carolina Population Center and the National Science Foundation, we collaborated with the Institute of Sociology (Shanghai University) in a survey of 1200 adults in Shanghai, winter and spring of 1987-88 (see Elder, Wu, & Jihui, 1993). Our purpose was to investigate the effects of historical change across the postwar years, but especially during the Cultural Revolution. 

4. "Children of the Great Depression" are members of two different studies at the Institute of Human Development, University of California, Berkeley. The Oakland Growth Study includes up to 200 people who attended school in the northeastern center of Oakland, California. Born in 1920-21, their story of growing up in the Great Depression is told in Children of the Great Depression: Social Change in Life Experience (Elder, 1974). Members of the Guidance Study were born in Berkeley during the years 1928-29 and their Depression experience into adulthood is told in a number of publications, including Elder, 1979 and 1981; Elder, Liker, & Jaworski, 1984; and Elder, Liker, & Cross, 1984. 

5. As one might expect, this principle is most fully expressed today in the work of historians who have played an important role in the development of life course studies. Foremost in this group is Tamara Hareven who has pioneered in the historical study of families and lives (see especially Transitions (1978) and Family Time and Industrial Time (1982). Another important contribution is John Modell's (1989) study of the emergence of the social institutions of adolescence (such as dating, courtship) across 20th century America. A collaboration between historians and developmentalists in studies of children is reported in Children in Time and Place (Elder, Modell, & Parke, 1993). Ways of studying children in history are explored by Cahan, Mechling, Sutton-Smith, & White (1993). Elder & Hareven (1993) show that historical effects in the lives of Depression youth varied by place, such as community and region. 

6. The best single source on this comparison can be found in a book of chapter-length updates of the IHD longitudinal samples in later life (see Elder, 1981). 

7. This dimension of timing has been associated with Bernice Neugarten's work on adult development since the 1950s (see Neugarten, 1968; Neugarten & Datan, 1973; and Hagestad & Neugarten, 1985). In the 1960s, sociological studies of age greatly expanded our understanding of the social and individual implications of the temporal pattern of events (see Riley, Johnson, & Foner, 1972). 

8. The principle of linked lives is based on a social role account of human lives. The most notable early example of this approach is Thomas and Znaniecki's The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918-20). The idea of linked lives is expressed in the personal networks of individuals (Granovetter, 1973) and in their convoys of friends and family over time (Kahn & Antonucci, 1980). Synchronization in life planning and action refers to the coordination of lives, usually on matters of timing (see Hareven, 1991). The concept of family management (see Furstenberg, 1993; Sampson, 1992) generally concerns the effectiveness of synchronization among members, along with other processes. 

9. This theme is developed by Albert Bandura (1989) and Elder (1995) in the field of psychology and life course, and it is a general theme in social history as well. As Hareven (1996, p. 320) points out, "the new social history has shown in a more direct way how social change impinges on the lives of people and how, in turn, human agency has affected social change." 

10. For an account of this theoretical development, see Elder (in press), "The Life Course and Human Development," in Handbook of Child Psychology, Volume 1: Theoretical Models of Human Development, edited by R. M. Lerner (W. Damon, General Editor). 

11. Robert J. Sampson (1997), and also Furstenberg et al. (forthcoming). 

12. The diversity is represented by Featherman's (1983) survey of status attainment in sociology, family and life course in history, and intellectual functioning in life-span developmental psychology. See also Elder, "The Life Course and Human Development" (forthcoming). 

13. Hagestad & Neugarten, 1985, op cit. 

14. These challenges to life course theory and analysis -- thinking about lives, human development, and their relation to changing times -- are a large part of the story, but they should be combined with the task of establishing concepts of development that apply across the life course, a major item on the agenda of developmental life-span psychology (Baltes, Lindenberger, & Staudinger, in press). In "The Life Course and Human Development" (Elder, in press), I discuss the convergence of these strands in contemporary life course theory. Paul Baltes has been most involved over the years in the development of life-span concepts. In his writings, selection, optimization, and compensation mechanisms aim to minimize the impact of organismic losses and maximize gains. Thus, children may select activities in which they are successful, whether sports or music, and optimize benefits through an investment of time, energy, and relationships. In old age, the musician might restrict the number of pieces and practice more often to compensate for declining physical skill. 

15. The concept of turning point has been used to refer to the re-direction of one's life course, developmental trajectory, or both. Michael Rutter (1996) has written at length on this concept as has John Clausen (1995). Clausen includes a change in life-course meaning as a "turning point." 

16. Avshalom Caspi, with colleagues, has written extensively on mechanisms of behavioral continuity and change (Caspi, Bem, & Elder, 1989). 

17. Findings on veterans of World War II are reported by Pavalko & Elder (1990), and Clipp & Elder (1996). However, most of the evidence on these processes comes from studies of Vietnam veterans (see Hendin & Haas, 1984). 

18. Members of the "sent down generation" were disadvantaged in education, work careers, mate selection, and family-formation (Elder, Wu, & Jihui 1993). 

19. Established with an NICHD training grant in 1987, the Carolina Consortium on Human Development (UNC-Chapel Hill) represents a community of developmentalists from a wide range of disciplines in the region. Each semester the Consortium proseminar focuses on a different theme or topic. One of our early seminars addressed "multiple perspectives on developmental science" and authored a collaborative statement for the resulting book, Developmental Science: Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives, edited by, R. B. Cairns, G. H. Elder, Jr., & E. J. Costello (1996). The statement claims that "Developmental Science refers to a fresh synthesis that has been generated to guide research in the social, psychological, and biobehavioral disciplines. It describes a general orientation for linking concepts and findings of hitherto disparate areas of developmental inquiry, and it emphasizes the dynamic interplay of processes across time frames, levels of analysis, and contexts. Time and timing are central to this perspective...The pathways of development are relative to time and place; they contribute to - and reflect - temporal changes in culture and society" (p. 1, italics removed).

Baltes, P. M., Lindenberger, U. & Staudinger, U. M. (In press). Life-span theory in developmental psychology. In R. M. Lerner (Ed.), Handbook of child Psychology, Volume 1: Theoretical models of human development. W. Damon, General Editor. (5th edition.) New York: Wiley.

Bandura, A. (1989). Human agency in social cognitive theory. American Psychologist, 44(9), 1175-1184.

Burton, L. M. (1985). Early and on-time grandmotherhood in multigenerational black families. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Southern California.

Cahan, E., Mechling, J., Sutton-Smith, B. & White, S. H. (1993). The elusive historical child: Ways of knowing the child of history and psychology. In G. H. Elder, Jr., J. Modell & R. D. Parke (Eds.), Children in time and place (pp. 192-223). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Cairns, R. B., Elder, G. H., Jr. & Costello, E. J. (Eds.) (1996). Developmental science. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Caspi, A., Bem, D. J., & Elder, G. H., Jr. (1989). Continuities and consequences of interactional styles across the life course. Journal of Personality, 57(2), 375-406.

Caspi, A., & Moffitt, T. E. (1993). When do individual differences matter? A paradoxical theory of personality coherence. Psychological Inquiry, 4, 247-271.

Clausen, J. A. (1993). American lives: Looking back at the children of the Great Depression. New York: Free Press.

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