Mayer’s review serves two primary aims: to report on trends in life course research, focusing on empirical studies published since 2000, and to assess the overall development and current state of the field. Life course research has emerged as a significant interdisciplinary area of study, spanning anthropology, demography, economics, sociology, and developmental psychology, with sociology acting as an important disciplinary anchor. Over the past 30 to 40 years, this field has matured, and longitudinal data collections have become the “gold standard” for quantitative social science research.
The article highlights major advancements in four key areas since 2000:
- National individual-level longitudinal databases: There has been a significant development and provision of these databases, enabling the observation of human lives across long stretches of time and multiple birth cohorts. Examples include the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the Health and Retirement Survey, and the German Socio-Economic Panel.
- The impact of institutional contexts on life courses: Research has increasingly explored how cross-national variations in institutional conditions and policies influence life course outcomes. This includes studies on the institutionalization of the life course and the specific impacts of welfare states.
- Life courses under conditions of societal ruptures: Sudden system changes, such as the transition of former socialist countries, provide crucial testing grounds for life course theory, examining how lives are shaped by old systems and how individuals adapt to new eras.
- Health across the life course: This is identified as the fastest-growing research area, focusing on health outcome trajectories and the mechanisms linking age-specific health risks to socioeconomic inequalities.
Despite these advancements, Mayer notes that progress has been less pronounced in four other areas, indicating significant unfulfilled potential:
- Internal dynamics and causal linkages across life: More research is needed to understand how early conditions relate to later outcomes and the dynamics of life trajectories over many decades.
- The interaction of development and socially constructed life courses: There’s a recognized need for systematic investigation into how psychological dispositions and processes interact with socially embedded life courses.
- Theory development: Life course sociology currently lacks a coherent body of explanatory theory, relying more on a “perspective” or “heuristics” than unified theoretical frameworks, although there are emerging developments, such as the theory of cumulative advantage/disadvantage and concepts of risk.
- New methods: While there has been progress in areas like event history analysis and sequence analysis, there is still a need for further methodological breakthroughs to fully leverage available longitudinal data and address complex interdependencies.
Mayer concludes that while life course research has achieved considerable success in integrating a life course perspective and longitudinal methods into various sociological specialties (the “mission accomplished” view), many major tasks remain unresolved, suggesting the field is “ready for takeoff” given new data sources, potential theory development, and emerging methods.
Reference for the Article:
Mayer, K. U. (2009). New directions in life course research. Annual Review of Sociology, 35, 413–433. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.34.040507.134619
