In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • From Adolescence to Adulthood in the Vietnam Era
  • Angela M. O’Rand
From Adolescence to Adulthood in the Vietnam Era By Timothy Owens Springer, 2005. 195 pages. $69.95 (cloth).

The life course perspective provides a general framework for studying the temporal organization of lives. Lives are constituted of sequentially contingent changes in statuses and roles over the life span that are shaped by historical context, social relations and the biographical accumulation of experiences across contexts that influence individual perceptions and behaviors. Arguably, the transition to adulthood is the most pivotal – and perhaps fateful – of status changes because it represents the emergence of the adult self, who carries the influences of the past into the future and selects among new contexts for the further development of self.

Timothy Owens' study of the transition from adolescence to adulthood in the Vietnam era adopts this perspective. He follows boys from the 10th grade in 1966 to 1974 using the Youth in [End Page 2365] Transition study (YIT), a five-wave longitudinal study. He is interested in how the movement of these boys from high school to three alternative statuses – military service, fulltime work, and fulltime college attendance – affects their subsequent self-esteem in young adulthood. These three "choice contexts" are described in light of their historical circumstances, i.e. the mid-1960s to early 1970s when military service was associated with the Vietnam War, full-time work occurred in the recent historical environment of a thriving economy (soon to begin changing for the worse in 1974), and college attendance was the highest in the history of the United States. He argues that self-esteem should be influenced by these "occupational choices" in ways shaped by their historical context, although he makes no specific predictions drawn from theory for alternative outcomes.

The linkage of self-esteem to social contexts is putatively framed by reference to three perspectives: Dannefer's sociogenic thesis, Glenn's aging-stability hypothesis and Bronfenbrenner's ecology of human development. These perspectives are summarized, but their integration into a coherent framework with a specific set of hypotheses is never fully developed. In effect, Owens argues that individual development unfolds across social contexts such as family of origin and post-high school choice contexts (c.f., Dannefer and Bronfenbrenner) in ways that reinforce relatively stable value orientations (c.f., Glenn), but again, without specific hypotheses. He defers to Elder's work on the principles of the life course perspective, but here again he does not integrate this with the other literatures. He also refers to theories of vocational personality and social networks that are left unintegrated into a coherent conceptual framework. Why he omits some middle-range theories, such as self-efficacy theory is not clear, although he later refers to them while interpreting his results. All of this produces an introductory chapter that offers little direction regarding the analyses to follow and fails to anticipate the results.

The analysis confronts and attempts to deal with all the usual challenges of longitudinal research: sample attrition, missing data and omitted variables. Sample selection methods are applied and described in considerable detail. Attrition and missing values are handled in a straightforward way. Also, he retains those "other" cases (39 percent of the total sample) in the final models that do not fit into his three preferred normative choice contexts (military, work and college) as controls for sample selection. The "other" category consists of boys who moved between work, non-work and schooling too frequently to be classified in these categories over the period.

However, one can argue that this decision itself introduces a kind of selective analytical bias that perhaps has more significant consequences for understanding the findings than conventional sample selection effects (which in the final structural equation models appear to have no effect on self-esteem anyway). Owens finds that his three normative contexts have weak negative (military, work) or no effects (college attendance) on self-esteem. But, he does find that "time-in-context" has the strongest positive effect on self-esteem. He argues that this finding demonstrates that "the longer an individual participates in a specific social context… the more competent and efficacious, and self confident...

pdf

Share