The Craft of Life Course Research

This book brings together prominent investigators to provide a comprehensive guide to doing life course research, including an “inside view” of how they designed and carried out influential longitudinal studies. Using vivid examples, the contributors trace the connections between early and later experience and reveal how researchers and graduate students can discover these links in their own research. Well-organized chapters describe the best and newest ways to:

*Use surveys, life records, ethnography, and data archives to collect different types of data over years or even decades.

*Apply innovative statistical methods to measure dynamic processes that result in improvement, decline, or reversibility in economic fortune, stress, health, and criminality.

*Explore the micro- and macro-level explanatory factors that shape individual trajectories, including genetic and environmental interactions, personal life history, interpersonal ties, and sociocultural institutions.

1. Life Course Studies: An Evolving Field, Glen H. Elder, Jr., and Janet Z. Giele

Part I. Methods of Data Collection

2. The Wisconsin Longitudinal Study: Designing a Study of the Life Course, Robert M. Hauser

3. Collecting and Interpreting Life Records, Dennis P. Hogan and Carrie E. Spearin

4. Longitudinal Ethnography: Uncovering Domestic Abuse in Women’s Lives, Linda M. Burton, Diane Purvin, and Raymond Garrett-Peters

5. Linking Research Questions to Data Archives, Glen H. Elder, Jr., and Miles G. Taylor

Part II. Measuring Life Course Dynamics

6. Cumulative Processes in the Life Course, Angela M. O’Rand

7. Life Transitions and Daily Stress Processes, David M. Almeida and Jen D. Wong

8. Conceptualizing and Measuring Trajectories, Linda K. George

9. Group-Based Trajectories in Life Course Criminology, Elaine Eggleston Doherty, John H. Laub, and Robert J. Sampson

Part III. Investigating Explanatory Factors

10. Genetics and Behavior in the Life Course: A Promising Frontier, Michael J. Shanahan and Jason D. Boardman

11. Life Stories to Understand Diversity: Variations by Class, Race, and Gender, Janet Z. Giele

12. Social Convoys: Studying Linked Lives in Time, Context, and Motion, Phyllis Moen and Elaine Hernandez

13. Comparative Life Course Research: A Cross-National and Longitudinal Perspective, Hans-Peter Blossfeld