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Reviewed by:
  • The Craft of Life Course Research
  • Ross Macmillan
The Craft of Life Course Research Edited by Glen H. Elder, Jr. and Janet Z. Giele The Guilford Press. 2009. 372 pages. $65 cloth, $42 paper.

Elder and Giele end their introductory chapter to this fascinating and enormously useful book with the statement "This is an exciting time for life course research, and we hope this book proves to be useful to our readers."(24) From my vantage point as a sociologist, demographer, and somewhat statistician, Elder and Giele both understate scope of our "exciting times" and are overly humble about the utility of their book.

This is not a book just for life course scholars, nor is it a book just for sociologists. This is a book for anyone who thinks time matters in human affairs and views time as a fundamental aspect of any type of social inquiry. As described by both the editors in a wonderfully succinct, yet informative, chapter, a life course perspective has been brewing for much of the last century, really caught fire in the 1970s, and is now widely deployed in social science research. Its basic concepts tie individuals to social structures. Its framework views individuals and social structures as having joint dynamics. These joint dynamic literally create the social experiences of individuals, which recursively produce, reproduce and alter the social landscapes of the future. All through this process, individual agency influences the pathways through life and the experiences that come with different and disparate routes over the life span. This type of thinking, not to mention the methods and models that have been produced in response, now influence a variety of social science disciplines, has informed some of the most significant research projects of the past quarter century, and is the backbone to some of the most important data collection efforts that the world has ever seen. Although the question of a true "paradigm shift" in the social sciences is still open, vast segments of the social sciences seem incomplete, if not down right silly, by ignoring the fundamental principles of a life course perspective.

There are three reasons why Elder and Giele's collection makes for such compelling and interesting reading. First, all chapters elaborate different aspects of a life course perspective that really convey the wide array of questions, topics and areas that can be informed by it. Second, they all include sophisticated but comprehensible elaborations of data and analytic strategies that are consistent with a life course approach. Finally, all the authors bring an insider's perspective and flesh out their discussions with stories gleaned from the various (high profile) projects in which they have been involved. This latter "view from the trenches" is a particularly effective way of elaborating the [End Page 1459] significance of a life course approach and is an innovative way of describing the dos and don'ts, the promises and the pitfalls of life course-informed research.

After a thoughtful and comprehensive overview by the editors, the chapters are organized into three sections: data collection, measuring life course dynamics and explanatory factors. In the first section, Hauser provides an insider's description of the origins and development of the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study that reveals the fascinating way the study evolved in light of changing priorities and technologies of the social sciences. It is also a must-read for anyone interested in seeing the proper way to run a longitudinal study (or any study for that matter). Hogan and Spearin's excellent chapter explains the logic and practice of using administrative data, what they call "life records," and draws heavily on the fascinating reconstruction of socio-demographic life in Casalecchio di Reno to show the multiple types of life records, the various ways records can be combined, and strategies for assessing the validity and accuracy of the resulting data. If anything, they undersell the importance of such work given the proliferation of "research data centers" across the United States that provide a secure and policed environment for the linking of a vast range of administrative data and social survey data in ways that earlier generations of researchers could have only dreamt about. Burton and colleagues...

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