A Companion to Life Course Studies: The Social and Historical Context of the British Birth Cohort Studies

Since the end of the Second World War, society has been characterised by rapid and extensive political, economic, scientific, and technological change. Opportunities for education, employment, human relations, and good health, have all been greatly affected by those changes, as have all aspects of life. Consequently, each post-war generation has been like no other before or since.

Britain, uniquely, has five large-scale life course studies that began at intervals throughout that period. They have shown how lives are shaped by individual characteristics, their past and current experiences and opportunities, and so reflect their times. This book describes those fundamental changes that affected life chances differently in each generation, and how governments struggled to accommodate the changes with new policies for improving and managing the nation's capital in terms of education, family policy, health, human rights, and economics.

A Companion to Life Course Studies provides a resource for the interpretation of the findings and design differences in the five studies, and the stimulus for new comparisons of life course between these differing generations that would contribute to policy and to understanding.

Michael Wadsworth directed the first birth cohort study until 2006, reconfiguring it as a study of physical and mental change with age, adding a study of the following generation, and the collection of DNA, and writing a history of its findings during the first thirty-six years in their historical and social context in The Imprint of Time.

John Bynner directed the Centre for Longitudinal Studies and the 1958 and 1970 cohort studies within a comparative life course study framework until 2003. He also directed the Wider Benefits of Learning Research Centre and the National Research and Development Centre for Adult Literacy and Numeracy.