Invitation to the Life Course: Towards new understandings of later life (Society and Aging Series) - Hardcover

Settersten, Richard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0895032694 ISBN 13: 9780895032690

Publisher: Routledge, 2002

Synopsis

Invitation to the Life Course: Toward New Understandings of Later Life discusses in depth the challenges of age, time, and social contexts for the study of aging and later life. Understanding aging (as a process) and later life (as a period) must be accompanied by serious attention to the life course. This brings significant challenges related to time, as gerontologists must describe and explain life patterns over many decades. It also brings significant challenges related to place, as gerontologists must examine how social contexts structure pathways into and through later life, and how those contexts affect the nature and meaning of experiences along the way. This book is a natural extension of the editor's previous work, ""Lives in Time and Place: The Problems and Promises of Developmental Science"" (Baywood, 1999).

About this title

About the Author

Keith Park

From the Inside Flap

"This is a timely book which approaches aging from a life course perspective. It calls for a re-orientation in gerontology by focusing on the variability of biographical experience in the contexts of historical, social, institutional and personal time. In an era of "graying societies" with a growing interest in biomedical models and genetic explanations of longevity, this book is an important corrective against genetic engineering. The editor and the contributors present a clear message: aging is a life-long process of socially embedded choices of pathways, forms of living and working. This message is pertinent not just for social gerontologists, but for life-span human developmentalists, social policy researchers and social scientists who are interested in an interdisciplinary approach to aging."
Professor Walter R. Heinz, Director, Life Course Center, University of Bremen

"This is an excellent book that confronts the reader with the wide range of complexities associated with time and the relevance of these complexities to the understanding of age and ageing. Collectively, the authors provide a powerful argument, that by concentrating on the intersection of social and historical factors with personal biography, the life course perspective can be used to move forward the field of ageing. While it is a challenge to develop a sense of coherence in an edited volume, the editor is to be congratulated in developing a book in which the chapters are consistently well-written and relevant to the goal of using life course theory to enhance scholarship on ageing and later life. The book should be on the required reading list of gerontologists interested in theory development and application, especially for those willing to wade into the contextual complexities of later life."
Norah Keating, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, Ageing & Society, Volume 22, 2002.

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0895032694
• ISBN 13: 9780895032690
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368