To browse Academia. Life course research has been developing quickly these last decades for good reasons. Life course approaches focus on essential questions about individuals' trajectories, longitudinal analyses, cross-fertilization across disciplines like lifespan psychology, developmental social psychology, sociology of the life course, social demography, socio-economics, social history.
Life course is also at the crossroads of several fields of specialization like family and social relationships, migration, education, professional training and employment, and health. This Series invites academic scholars to present theoretical, methodological, and empirical advances in the analysis of the life course, and to elaborate on possible implications for society and social policies applications. Changes in human lives are studied in psychology, sociology, and adjacent fields as outcomes of developmental processes, institutional regulations and policies, culturally and normatively structured life courses, or empirical accounts.
However, such studies have used a wide range of complementary, but often divergent, concepts. This review has two aims. First, we report on the structure that has emerged from scientific life course research by focusing on abstracts from longitudinal and life course studies beginning with the year Second, we provide a sense of the disciplinary diversity of the field and assess the value of the concept of 'vulnerability' as a heuristic tool for studying human lives.
Applying correspondence analysis to 10, scientific abstracts, we find a disciplinary divide between psychology and sociology, and observe indications of both similarities of-and differences between-studies, driven at least partly by the data and methods employed. We also find that vulnerability takes a central position in this scientific field, which leads us to suggest several reasons to see value in pursuing theory development for longitudinal and life course studies in this direction.
Empirical life course research is based on prospective or retrospective longitudinal micro data and nationally representative samples of birth cohorts or larger populations. This field of research has developed since the s as one of the major social science instruments of studying the dynamics of both individual lives and societies. The paper reviews critically the contributions of life course studies by comparing the initial expectations with practices and results during the last twenty years.
