Glen H. Elder

Time, human agency, and social change: Perspectives on the life course.

The life course has emerged over the past 30 years as a major research paradigm. Distinctive themes include the relation between human lives and a changing society, the timing of lives, linked or interdependent lives, and human agency. Two lines of research converged in the formation of this paradigm during the 1960s; one was associated with an older «social relationship» tradition that featured intergenerational studies, and the other with more contemporary thinking about age. The emergence of a life course paradigm has been coupled with a notable decline in socialization as a research framework and with its incorporation by other theories

The Emergence and Development of Life Course Theory

Today, the life course perspective is perhaps the pre-eminent theoretical orientation in the study of lives, but this has not always been the case. The life histories and future trajectories of individuals and groups were largely neglected by early sociological research. In the pioneering study, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918-1920), W. I. Thomas (with Florian Znaniecki) first made use of such histories and trajectories and argued strongly that they be investigated more fully by sociologists. By the mid-1920s, Thomas was emphasizing the vital need for a “longitudinal approach to life history” using life record data (Volkart, 1951, p. 593). He advocated that studies investigate “many types of individuals with regard to their experiences and various past periods of life in different situations” and follow “groups of individuals into the future, getting a continuous record of experiences as they occur.” Though this advice went unheeded for decades, Thomas’s early recommendations anticipated study of the life course and longitudinal research that has become such a central part of modern sociology and other disciplines.

Linking Economic Hardship to Marital Quality and Instability.

Utilizing a sample of 76 white middle-class couples from a rural midwestern county in the US this study examines 2 central propositions: 1)the negative impact of economic hardship on a spouses marital quality (happiness/satisfaction) or marital instability (thoughts or actions related to divorce) is in part a function of its influence on the effective quality of marital interactions and 2) this process is particularly applicable to the hostile irritable response of men to financial difficulties. A series of analyses supported these propositions. Economic pressures had an indirect association with married couples evaluation of the marriage by promoting hostility in marital interactions and curtailing the warm and supportive behaviors spouses express toward one another. The hypothesized process was most pronounced for husbands whose behavior was more strongly associated with economic problems than wives behavior. Findings from the study are consistent with previous research that identifies negative affect as a principal behavioral correlate of marital distress; however the results also suggest that more research needs to be done on the role of warmth and supportiveness in promoting marital quality. (authors)

Pubertal transition, stressful life events, and the emergence of gender differences in adolescent depressive symptoms.

This study examined the role of both pubertal and social transitions in the emergence of gender differences in depressive symptoms during adolescence. This study generated the following findings: (a) Gender differences in depressive symptoms emerged during 8th grade and remained significant through 12th grade. (b) Pubertal status in 7th grade was related to adolescent depressive symptoms over time. (c) Early-maturing girls represented the group with the highest rate of depressive symptoms. (d) Depressive symptoms measured in 7th grade predicted subsequent symptom levels throughout the secondary school years. (e) Recent stressful life events were associated with increased depressive symptoms. (f) Early-maturing girls with higher levels of initial symptoms and more recent stressful life events were most likely to be depressed subsequently. The findings demonstrate the importance of the interaction between the pubertal transition and psychosocial factors in increasing adolescent vulnerability to depressive experiences.

Linking family hardship to children's lives.

The impact of drastic income loss on children is mediated by a number of family adaptations, including the shift toward more labor-intensive households and altered relationships. Using newly developed codes on parenting behavior during the Great Depression, this study investigates the role of parental behavior (rejecting, nonsupportive) in linking economic hardship to childrens lives in the Oakland Growth Study. The results extend beyond those reported in Children of the Great Depression by showing that economic hardship adversely influenced the psychosocial well-being of girls, but not boys, by increasing the rejecting behavior of fathers. The parenting behavior of mothers did not vary significantly by income loss. In addition, the rejecting influence of hard-pressed fathers was more pronounced in relation to less attractive daughters, as judged by physical features. Attractive daughters were not likely to be maltreated by their fathers, no matter how severe the economic pressure. These outcomes on family mediation and conditional effects underscore the importance of viewing economic decline in relation to both the childs characteristics and parenting behavior. An understanding of the effects of economic decline in childrens lives requires knowledge of parent and child behavior within the family and life course.

Intergenerational Bonding in School: The Behavioral and Contextual Correlates of Student-Teacher Relationships

To explore the significance of social integration in the educational system, this study examined whether student-teacher relationships predicted two important student behavioral outcomes (academic achievement and disciplinary problems); whether these within-school intragenerational relationships were predicted by the structural, compositional, and climate-related characteristics of schools; and how the behavioral and contextual correlates of student-teacher relationships varied by race-ethnicity. Our findings, based on nationally representative panel data, indicated that stronger intergenerational bonding in school was associated with higher academic achievement, especially for Hispanic American girls, and with a lower likelihood of disciplinary problems, especially for white girls. Moreover, these intragenerational bonds were stronger in schools with several characteristics (private sector, greater racial-ethnic matching between students and the student body, greater perceived safety, and lower socioeconomic status), although these associations also differed by race-ethnicity.

Couple resilience to economic pressure.

Over 400 married couples participated in a 3-year prospective study of economic pressure and marital relations. The research (a) empirically evaluated the family stress model of economic stress influences on marital distress and (b) extended the model to include specific interactional characteristics of spouses hypothesized to protect against economic pressure. Findings provided support for the basic mediational model, which proposes that economic pressure increases risk for emotional distress, which, in turn, increases risk for marital conflict and subsequent marital distress. Regarding resilience to economic stress, high marital support reduced the association between economic pressure and emotional distress. In addition, effective couple problem solving reduced the adverse influence of marital conflict on marital distress. Overall, the findings provided substantial support for the extended family stress model.

Inner-City Parents Under Economic Pressure: Perspectives on the Strategies of Parenting.

The historical record of industrial societies documents the widespread consequences of economic hard times for families and children, including greater risks of marital breakdown, child abuse, and neglect (Eckenrode & Gore, 1990). These hardships are commonly linked to the recessions and depressions of economic cycles, but they also stem from an expanding economic inequality between families at opposite ends of the class structure. In the United States, this gap has significantly increased in recent decades, placing a large number of lower income families in more desperate straits. Socioeconomic trends over the 1980s markedly reduced the size of the middle class (Duncan, Smeeding, & Rodgers, 1991) and placed lower income families under mounting economic pressures as their standard of living lost ground relative to that of upper income households (Bradbury, 1990). Featured among these declines are the younger heads of households and single parents. However, no families have experienced more disadvantages from this change than younger African American and European American families who are concentrated in the impoverished neighborhoods of Americas inner cities (Jencks & Peterson, 1991; Wilson, 1987). Similar to inner-city families during depression eras of plummeting income and soaring hardship (Elder, 1974), these families face stark necessities with limited options. What are the consequences of this rising level of economic pressure for parenting among inner-city families? Two complementary approaches are relevant to an investigation of this question. One approach traces the effect of macro, sociodemographic and economic changes on families through their impact on characteristics of the neighborhoods in which the families and children reside (Brooks-Gunn, Duncan, Klebanov, & Sealand, 1993). These characteristics include social composition, cohesion, and control, as well as the presence of service institutions and family networks. The other approach views parents and children as actors within the correlated constraints and options of their inner-city neighborhoods. This approach focuses on the within-neighborhood heterogeneity of families, as expressed in financial and psychological resources, perceptions of neighborhood, and family management strategies (Eccles et al., 1992; Furstenberg, 1993; Walker & Furstenberg, 1994). The central questions of this approach focus on modes of family adaptation, their variations and consequences. Both of these approaches are concerned with the extent to which families select themselves into the places where they live (Tienda, 1991). This study follows the second approach in addressing the process by which economic hardship and pressures adversely affect both the emotional health and parenting behaviors of inner-city African American and European American parents. Building upon the insights of an ethnographic study of inner-city parenting in Philadelphia (Furstenberg, 1993), a team of senior researchers, working in conjunction with their membership in the MacArthur Network on Successful Adolescent Development in High-Risk Settings; (see Jessor, 1993), developed survey instruments to investigate variations in parenting among inner-city neighborhoods. These instruments were then administered to a sample of nearly 500 Philadelphia families of lower middle-class to lower lower-class status with a young adolescent (ages 11 to 15) in the household. In this study we test the hypotheses (a) that parental emotional distress represents an important bridge between family economic hardship and parental ineffectiveness in beliefs and actions, (b) that the process varies by family structure and social emotional support, and (c) that parents with a sense of efficacy tend to engage in family strategies that promote developmental opportunities and minimize risks. Emotional distress refers to a variety of uncomfortable subjective states, from forms of malaise to anxiety and depressed affect (Mirowsky & Ross, 1989). …

APPEARANCE AND EDUCATION IN MARRIAGE MOBILITY

The relative influence of attractiveness and educational attainment in marriage mobility was investigated in a longitudinal sample of women from middle- and working-class families. The women were born in the early 1920s, were intensively studied during the 1930s, and most of them participated in at least one adult follow-up. During adolescence, middle-class girls were significantly higher on physical attractiveness, groomed appearance, and IQ than girls from the working class. The two groups did not differ on status aspiration or academic aptitude. In the total sample, girls who became upwardly mobile through marriage were characterized by physical attractiveness, a desire to impress and control others, high aspirations for the future, and an avoidance of steady dating. Intelligence and academic aptitude were not directly predictive of marriage mobility, although both factors influenced the adult status of the women through their educational attainment. Among women from the working class, physical attractiveness was more predictive of marriage to a high-status man than educational attainment, while the relative effects of these factors were reversed among women of middle-class origin. Social ascent from the working class was also related to sexual restraint and a well-groomed appearance. M ARRIAGE between persons of similar

Cumulative Advantage Processes as Mechanisms of Inequality in Life Course Health1

While there is consistent evidence that inequality in economic resources follows a process of cumulative advantage, the application of this framework to another aspect of life course inequality, health, has not produced consensus. This analysis uses longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to examine the over‐time relationship between health and socioeconomic status, considering how multiple dimensions of socioeconomic resources and economic history are related to health disparities as people age. The authors find cautious support for path‐ and duration‐dependent processes of cumulative advantage in health. Results suggest that in studies of mechanisms of inequality over time, the cumulative advantage process may appear to be bounded by age because of the disproportionate attrition and mortality of those with low socioeconomic status.