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Traces the author's career involvement with life-course studies, highlighting the value of archival data in longitudinal research. The techniques of archival research utilized in coding the data from three longitudinal studies begun in the 1920s-1930s at the Instit of Human Development, U of California, Berkeley, are reviewed, & ongoing findings from the studies are reported. The influence on the author's work of the sociological perspective on the life course, which locates human development within the historical times & places of which individuals are a part, is acknowledged. The continuing development of theories of the life cycle & life course is traced, along with methodological refinements & innovations in the collection & analysis of longitudinal data, 1960s-1990s. 41 References. K. Hyatt Stewart

As a theoretical orientation, the life course brings a contextual, dy namic, and temporal perspective to studies of families and lives in the past and present. Building upon literature reviews in the mid-1970s, this essay examines some elementary distinctions of life-course analysis, including the links between age, temporality and the life course; the dynamics of interdependent lives; and the unit of analysis problem. Emerging conceptual and research approaches to the household exemplify these distinctions. The relation between social change and the life course remains one of the more central and challenging areas of life-course study.

The analytic value of res on youth groups & peer influence which takes into account the potential effects of community characteristics & instit'al arrangements is affirmed. 2 problems that entail relationships between total system & interactional contexts are dealt with: (a) the effect of community characteristics on the degree & content of parent-peer influence; & (b) community factors in the emergence & interactional styles of a youth setting. An emergent youth setting refers to a location or territory which acquires special meaning & signif for sociable interaction. Such a setting is established by the initiative of youth, unlike territories prescribed by adults, eg, the youth clubs in the UK. An example of such an emergent youth setting is the drive-in in the US. Empirical data on drive-in patrons & other youth, derived from a survey by the author among a stratified probabil!ty sample of 5,545 students (stratified by race, sex, Sch & grade level), yielding completed questionnaires from about 75% of the sample, are used. In each drive-in, 3 conditions influenced the form & content of collective behavior among adolescents in the setting: (1) the convergence of youth with similar needs & interests; (2) the emergence of shared norms & identifications; & (3) the presence of conditions which either facilitate or inhibit processes of behavioral contagion. In conclusion, the importance of res into how the characteristics of the larger soc system shape the content & form of peer relations is stressed. 2 Tables. M. Maxfield.

We review research published in the past 15 years that explores the relationship between military service and the life course, focusing on criminal careers, marital status, lifelong health, and socioeconomic attainment. Throughout the review, we note the extent to which studies find that veterans experienced different outcomes in different historical periods, ranging from World War II to the more recent voluntary armed forces. The effects of military service depend on whether health, criminal, socioeconomic, or marital outcomes are considered. They also depend on the timing and era of service, and veterans' family background and individual characteristics such as race and delinquency. Nevertheless, the evidence to date suggests one general conclusion: Veterans exposed to combat have suffered worse outcomes than noncombat veterans and than nonveterans. We conclude with suggestions for future research including a tighter integration of the research questions and strategies that have been employed to examine the different outcomes.

The term "agency" is quite slippery and is used differently depending on the epistemological roots and goals of scholars who employ it. Distressingly, the sociological literature on the concept rarely addresses relevant social psychological research. We take a social behaviorist approach to agency by suggesting that individual temporal orientations are underutilized in conceptualizing this core sociological concept. Different temporal foci—the actor's engaged response to situational circumstances—implicate different forms of agency. This article offers a theoretical model involving four analytical types of agency ("existential," "identity," "pragmatic," and "life course") that are often conflated across treatments of the topic. Each mode of agency overlaps with established social psychological literatures, most notably about the self, enabling scholars to anchor overly abstract treatments of agency within established research literatures.

If problematic relationships with parents are an academic risk factor during adolescence, then nonparental sources of support (e.g., friends, siblings, and teachers) may be arenas of comfort that promote educational resilience in the face of such risk. In a series of structural models using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, the authors found that nonparental relationships are more likely to be directly associated with academic behavior than to interact with parent-related risk. Protective interactions occur only among certain subgroups. For example, close relationships with teachers and involvement with friends protect against parent-related academic risk among Asian American adolescents, whereas support from friends operates similarly for younger girls. In other subgroups, parental and nonparental relationships interact but not in a protective way. These patterns demonstrate the complex interplay of developmental ecology and larger social structures during the adolescent stage of life as well as the context-specific nature of resilience.