The course of human lives in Western society is inescapably shaped by political, cultural, and economic factors. Changes in these spheres inevitably lead to changes in our conceptions of everything from childhood and adulthood to family structures and living arrangements. The nineteen articles collected in The Life Course Reader offer a range of both theoretical and empirical studies of changing conceptions of the life course. Drawing on data from North America and Europe, the Reader will be indispensable for anyone studying human development and the twenty-first century family.
Using a life course approach, the main chapters in this truly original and enlightening text focus on health and well-being during each of our life stages. A wide range of contemporary literature from disciplines such as public health, sociology, epidemiology and social policy are drawn upon to examine key health and well-being issues in these stages, and to illustrate how health effects can accumulate across the life course. Interactive activities based on the text and on extracts from primary sources are used to encourage critical reflection and debate. Mary Larkin′s book will be essential reading for students on the many courses that need an understanding of health and well-being across all age groups. It will also be an invaluable resource for those in the health and social care sector as well as practitioners working in the field.
Using a theoretical orientation, this book explores the life course approach to family life - including parent-child, spousal, and sibling relationships. It reflects the diversity represented in contemporary families as they grapple with changes and transitions in family relationships during the life cycle.
Lone parenthood is an increasing reality in the 21st century, reinforced by the diffusion of divorce and separation. This volume provides a comprehensive portrait of lone parenthood at the beginning of the XXI century from a life course perspective. The contributions included in this volume examine the dynamics of lone parenthood in the life course and explore the trajectories of lone parents in terms of income, poverty, labour, market behaviour, wellbeing, and health. Throughout, comparative analyses of data from countries as France, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, Belgium, Sweden, Switzerland, Hungary, and Australia help portray how lone parenthood varies between regions, cultures, generations, and institutional settings. The findings show that one-parent households are inhabited by a rather heterogeneous world of mothers and fathers facing different challenges. Readers will not only discover the demographics and diversity of lone parents, but also the variety of social representations and discourses about the changing phenomenon of lone parenthood. The book provides a mixture of qualitative and quantitative studies on lone parenthood. Using large scale and longitudinal panel and register data, the reader will gain insight in complex processes across time. More qualitative case studies on the other hand discuss the definition of lone parenthood, the public debate around it, and the social and subjective representations of lone parents themselves. This book aims at sociologists, demographers, psychologists, political scientists, family therapists, and policy makers who want to gain new insights into one of the most striking changes in family forms over the last 50 years. This book is open access under a CC BY License.
Understanding the Life Course provides a uniquely comprehensive guide to the entire life course from an interdisciplinary perspective. Combining important insights from sociology and psychology, the book presents the concepts theoretical underpinnings in an accessible style, supported by real-life examples. From birth and becoming a parent, to death and grieving for the loss of others, Lorraine Green explores all stages of the life course through key research studies and theories, in conjunction with issues of social inequality and critical examination of lay viewpoints. She highlights the many ways the life course can be interpreted, including themes of linearity and multidirectionality, continuity and discontinuity, and the interplay between nature and nurture. The second edition updates key data and includes additional material on topics such as new technologies, changing markers of transitions to adulthood, active ageing, resilience and neuropsychology. This comprehensive approach will continue to be essential reading for students on vocational programmes such as social work and nursing, and will provide thought-provoking insight into the wider contexts of the life course for students of psychology and sociology.
The lifecourse perspective continues to be an important subject in the social sciences. Researching the Lifecourse offers a distinctive approach in that it truly covers the lifecourse (childhood, adulthood and older age), focusing on innovative methods and case study examples from a variety of European and North American contexts. This original approach connects theory and practice from across the social sciences by situating methodology and research design within relevant conceptual frameworks. This diverse collection features methods that are linked to questions of time, space and mobilities while providing practitioners with practical detail in each chapter.
The Welfare State and Life Transitions uses the lens of key life stages to highlight changes in these transitions and in available resources for citizen support within nine European welfare states. This timely book reveals that new life courses are found to require more, and not less welfare support, but only Sweden has developed an active life course approach and only three more could be considered supportive, in at least some life stages. For the remainder, policies were at best limited or, in Italy.s case, passive. The contributors reveal that the neglect of changing needs is leading to greater reliance on the family and the labour market, just as these support structures are becoming more unpredictable and moreunequal. They argue that alongside these new class inequalities, new forms of intergenerational inequality are also emerging, particularly in pension provision.
Populations around the globe are ageing rapidly. This demographic shift affects families, market structures and social provisions. This timely volume, part of the Ageing and the Lifecourse series, argues that the lifecourse perspective helps us understand the causes and effects of population ageing. The lifecourse perspective suggests that individuals’ experiences at an early age can influence their decisions and behaviour at a later age. This much-needed volume combines insights from different disciplines and real-life experiences to describe the theories and practices behind this idea. It therefore caters to the needs of scholars, practitioners and policy makers in a range of areas including sociology and political science.
Committed utilitarian reading is either dominantly practical or more or less equally practical and fulfilling. Pleasurable reading is conceptualized as an important kind of casual leisure, experienced primarily as relaxation, active entertainment, and sexual stimulation (racy, pornographic stories). Such reading can also be a launching pad for day-dreams or lively conversation. Self-fulfilling reading is explored in a disquisition on the liberal arts hobbies. This is no place for speed reading, but instead is where we care to pause often to appreciate the artistry of the writing, creativity of the plot, profundity of the message (i.e., the information it contains), and the like. And in fulfilling reading we sometimes want to analyze the material. This book explores three main motives for reading identified as utilitarian, pleasurable, and fulfilling. Its principal object is to deepen our understanding of why some adults (and eager late adolescent readers) go in for "committed reading," or reading that, as we strive to acquire literary knowledge and experience, necessarily consumes considerable time and requires continuous concentration. The conceptual frameworks guiding this endeavor are library and information science and the serious leisure perspective. Through their lenses the author examines the reading of books, magazines, manuals, reports, and other lengthy material as carried out in the three domains of life: work, leisure, and non-work obligation. In brief, committed reading provides its enthusiasts with knowledge and experience, which among other ways, are sought, acquired, interpreted, organized, and sometimes disseminated within the three domains. This book also examines committed reading in daily life, its ease, convenience, affordability, and enduring effects. There follows a portrait of the various reading environments, including music to read by, reading at airports and on airplanes, reading in one's study, in a park, on public transit, in public libraries, and elsewhere. This is part of the reader's social world, which is further comprised of book clubs, bookstores, Amazon.com, censorship, author public readings, and more.
