Handbook of the Life Course (review)

"All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty Dumpty together again."

– Mother Goose

A handbook on life course research is long overdue. The earlier overviews by Sorensen, Weinert and Sherrod (1986) and Riley, Huber and Hess (1988) charted the potential of a new and exciting interdisciplinary research program wherein social history, demography, sociology, life-span psychology and microeconomics would converge in the study of human lives. Such a program would mean new longitudinal data collections, new methods and models of dynamic analysis as well as exponentially increased computing power could open up new opportunities for empirical analysis. After more than two decades of a mounting wave of research it was time to take stock of what has been achieved and which new developments are shaping this field.

Jeylan Mortimer and Michael Shanahan have set for themselves the very ambitious goal of representing the current frontiers of theoretical, empirical and methodological work in a manner that captures the multifold perspectives across: life domains, life stages, disciplines, historical and national contexts and the levels of individual action and behavior and social organization. The powerful intellectual influence of Glen Elder is not only reflected in his and his co-author's opening piece on "The Emergence and Development of Life Course Theory," but very systematically throughout the Handbook. Most of the authors take all or parts of Elder's heuristics of life course theory as the structuring guide for their chapters.

The main rubrics and a number of subsections reflect the programmatic attempt of the editors to represent the quite divergent undercurrents and traditions of life course studies: human development and normative age differentiation, historical and cultural construction, social structure and demographic accounting, institutional influences and patterning, biography and life experience, functional aging and health. Under the rubric of "Historical and Cross-National Variability of the Life Course," we find a general overview chapter on "Generations, Cohorts and Social Change" (Alwin and McCammon) and a comparative case study on the United States and Japan on "Stratified Incentives and Life Course Behavior" (Kariya and Rosenbaum). The rubric "Normative Structuring of the Life Course" is covered by one partly systematic, partly empirical chapter by Settersten on "Age Structuring and the Rhythm of the Life Course."

The largest rubric "Movement Through the Life Course" contains five chapters on the "Institutional Structuring of Life Course Trajectories" focusing on newlyweds (Tallman), family context and individual well-being (Uhlenberg and Mueller), intergenerational relations (Putney and Bengtson), educational transitions (Pallas), an essay on contingent work lives (Heinz) and an excellent theoretical piece on governmental influences on the life course (Leisering). Three chapters under the subheading of "Transitions" deal with first-grade school entry (Entwisle, Alexander and Olson), the trajectory from school and training to work in a comparative perspective (Kerckhoff) and a "new" life stage called midcourse around retirement (Moen). The third subheading of "Turning Points" covers two partly overlapping contributions on desistance from crime (Sampson/Laub and Uggen/Massaglia) and an analytical overview of migration research with an empirical case study on the health of immigrants (Jasso).

The theme of "Life Course Construction" is divided into two subsections on "Agency" and "Connections Between Early and Subsequent Life Phases," the former being represented by an essay on self agency in which the life course connections are only marginally touched (Gecas) and the latter by highly informative reviews on the connections between childhood and adulthood (McLeod/Almazan) and on developmental continuity and discontinuity in adolescent substance use (Schulenberg/Maggs/O'Malley) and an empirical research report on adolescent work and its consequences for later careers (Mortimer, Staff and Oesterle). "Methods" are covered by five chapters: a less-than-up-to-date piece on cohort analysis (Glenn), event history models (Wu), panel and growth models (Halaby), latent structures (Macmillan and Eliason) and life story narratives (Cohler and Hostelter). Among the very best contributions to the volume are the three chapters on "Interdisciplinary Collaborations": personality trait development in adulthood (Roberts...