Life Course Theory
Life Course Theory, also called Life Course Perspective, says that if we can trace the paths people have taken through life we can understand a great deal about them and avoid making blatantly incorrect assumptions that negatively influence how they are treated medically, socially, or professionally.
This is a perspective that was originally developed in the 1960s and which has been elucidated in the decades since.
It was eventually embraced by metanational entities like the World Health Organization as a means of better understanding the people it wanted to serve, and is commonly applied by healthcare providers and occupational service providers around the world.
The basic premise is that who we are, today, is influenced by things that have happened to us throughout our lives.
Each person has a unique and complex set of experiences, but we can get statistically closer to that individual person’s specifics by looking at aspects of their life that might allow us to draw some broader conclusions, which we can then incorporate into our contemporary assessment of them.
A sociologist who has played a significant role in developing this concept, Glen H. Elder, Jr, has recommended paying particularly close attention to a person’s life-span development, human agency, historical time and geographic place, the timing of their decisions, and other people to whom they are linked in some way.
In practice, that means an African American man living in the US during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s will likely have had radically different fundamental life experiences than a White women living at the same time, even if they were the same age, lived in the same city, and had roughly the same economic circumstances.
It also means that someone with abusive parents will have had different variables influencing their early development than someone with supportive and loving parents, someone with no parents, or someone living in a communal situation in which they had many parents showing varying levels of care and attention.
Someone who put money in the stock market right before a market crash will likely have a different opinion of the market, economics in general, and even personal spending than someone who never invested in the market, or someone who put money in at the beginning of a decade-long upward climb. That timing could also impact when and if they buy a house, when and if they get married and have children, and when they retire.
This concept suggests that connecting dots, rather than simply identifying influential moments in a person’s life, is vital to understanding that person and their health, their economic wherewithal, their perspective on a variety of things, or whatever else.
It’s not enough to know that someone had abusive parents, then: you also need to know that they started a small business in high school, that they raised their siblings, that they fought in a war, and that they dropped out of university to get married.
Any one of these points in isolation can paint a picture that is inaccurate without the other details, and tracing these potentially impactful happenings through time can help us arrive at a more complete portrait than any unconnected dot in isolation.
Many modern applications of this approach have attempted to scale the concept up so that we needn’t create what amounts to a biography of a person in order to better understand them.
This often means identifying well-researched, data-rich attributes, places, and moments, and creating cadres of people—folks with shared variables who can be demographically measured with less resolution than an individual, but often more clearly than someone who is not placed into such a group—and then combining those cadres to create a sort of Life Course Theory outline.
Instead of learning every single detail of a person’s history, then—which would not be practical to do on a scale of millions of people logistically, but also because not everyone would be willing to share so much about their lives with the bureaucrats and health professionals who are often seeking this information—it’s possible to take publicly available information, like where a person was born, how old they are, injuries and health issues on record, and their professional and education path, and draw some informed conclusions about how some of these experiences, lined up in that order, may have influenced their outcomes and perspectives.
We might know, for instance, that a particular neighborhood in a particular city at a particular moment in time was cursed with lead pipes and asbestos: two materials that can cause developmental issues and cancers in people who are exposed to them, and which were common in many areas at a particular moment in history.
We might also know that someone was drafted into the military to fight in a particular conflict, that they broke a bone in their teens, that they went on unemployment during a stock market crash, and that they grew up during a pandemic.
Data exists about prevailing opinions, broad-stroke experiences, and in some cases, economic and interpersonal outcomes for groups of people who had these sorts of experiences or lived in these areas during these time periods.
It’s possible to chart out a rough course for someone who had these variables applied to their lives, even if the resulting outline will be far from exacting and may not apply to any individual, precisely.
Said another way: the Life Course Perspective is meant to help make people more legible to the entities that design and deploy services from which they might benefit.
On the personal level, it’s also a perspective that reminds us that what we see of the people around us is only the topmost strata of a very deep, rich, layered, experience-dense, human-shaped archeological site.
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