Deepening inequalities and wider processes of demographic, economic and social change are altering how people across the Global North move between homes and neighbourhoods over the lifespan.
This book presents a life course framework for understanding how the changing dynamics of people’s family, education, employment and health experiences are deeply intertwined with ongoing shifts in housing behaviour and residential pathways. Particular attention is paid to how these processes help to drive uneven patterns of population change within and across neighbourhoods and localities.
Integrating the latest research from multiple disciplines, the author shows how housing and life course dynamics are together reshaping 21st-century inequalities in ways that demand greater attention from scholars and public policymakers.
how who we are matters for our housing and how housing helps make us into who we are. This focus on how housing is embedded into the dynamics of 21st-century life courses enriches research and debate in two ways. First, the book has shown that residential decisions and behaviours are deeply intertwined with events and processes across the other domains of people’s lives, as well as in the lives of their significant others. The way housing careers unfold also varies geographically with shifts in housing behaviour helping to drive changes in local populations and in
67 Life course inequalities: generations and social class FOUR Life course inequalities: generations and social class Johan Fritzell Introduction This chapter studies health inequalities from a generational perspective but also aims to adopt a life course perspective. The interest in generations lies with the fact that birth cohorts encounter specific historical conditions and circumstances, situations that deviate from those of both earlier and later generations. ‘Children of the great depression’ is but one famous example in the literature (Elder, 1974). The
9 2 Life Course Theory Introduction This chapter will explore the concept of life course, the terminology used, and some of the challenges to it. It will soon become apparent that there is no one ‘theory of the life course’ and that perhaps it is more accurate to talk of ‘theories of the life course’. Even better, it should be seen not so much as a theory but as an approach or framework which evokes a series of questions and perspectives.1 It is therefore not an approach which seeks to offer a meta-theory or makes an argument for a particular normative
103 The life course FIVE The life course: dimensions of change in parenting and disability Introduction This chapter examines the importance of change in the experiences of disabled parents and their families. This involves focusing on hopes and experiences of becoming and being parents, within a life-course perspective. By this we mean exploring choices and expectations around parenting, from childhood through adolescence and into adulthood. Parenting is often perceived as a ‘normal’ feature of independent adult life. And yet attitudes towards disabled
This chapter lays the book’s conceptual foundations. After sketching three of the most influential disciplinary perspectives on residential behaviour, the chapter then reviews the specific conceptual approaches scholars have developed to understand how people move through housing systems as they pass through life. It contends that none of these approaches can fully describe or explain how housing is embedded into 21st-century lives. The chapter then moves on to outline a more modern life course framework which can provide new insights about contemporary
Court decisions are typically seen as one-off interventions relating to an incident in a person’s life, but a legal decision can impact on the person as they were and the person they will become.
This book is the first to explore the interactions of the law with the life course in order to understand the complex life journey as a whole.
Jonathan Herring reveals how the law privileges ‘middle age’ to the detriment of the whole life story and explains why an understanding of the life course is important for lawyers.
Relevant to those working in family law, elder law, medical law and ethics, jurisprudence, gender and the law, it will promote new thinking by exploring the engagement of the law with the life course of the self.
Key messages The life course of Chinese people born between 1920 and 1969 generally shows a trend of increasing standardisation. There is a higher level of standardisation in male and rural cohorts in occupational trajectories, compared to female and urban cohorts. In family life course, the standardisation of urban cohorts is higher than that of rural cohorts. Introduction By the 1960s, work and family trajectories in most Western countries had reached a high degree of homogeneity, manifested in the fact that a large majority of individuals
poor health ( Pinquart and Sörensen, 2007 ). This body of work has helped us move beyond monolithic but conflicting perspectives that family care is natural and should be assumed ( Al-Janabi et al , 2018 ), but that care needs will exceed the capacity of family carers ( Cherlin and Seltzer, 2014 ). Moen and DePasquale (2017: 50) argue the need for a critical examination of these tensions, calling for ‘scholarship capturing: caregiving trajectories and tradeoffs over the life course; variability in caregiving careers and compatibility of caregiving careers with
