Human Development in Time and Place

Abstract

The study of the life course and human development has evolved rapidly over the past quarter century, extending across substantive boundaries of the social, behavioral, and medical sciences. These advances have coincided with the spread of life course studies across diverse societies, as scholars draw on long‐term longitudinal archives to examine the implications of social change for human development. Viewed collectively, these cutting‐edge studies tell us much about the dimensions of historical time and place and their importance in shaping biographical pathways. The chapter begins with the theoretical traditions that have formed an interdisciplinary life course perspective on human development, one that views the person as embedded in a life‐long pattern of social roles, age distinctions, and relationships, processes that are themselves responsive to place and time. In the second section, elementary concepts (e.g., trajectories, transitions) and paradigmatic principles are introduced as a theoretical map of the life course. These concepts and principles have been applied in longitudinal studies of lives across societies (e.g., China, Germany, and Russia) and, within societies, by geographic distinctions (e.g., states, regions, and communities/neighborhoods). The chapter concludes by noting important advances in studying the impact of historical time and place.

Adolescent Health Development: A Relational Developmental Systems Perspective

“…Analogous to interpreting only main effects of statistical analyses framed by the General Linear Model, some scholars have focused on one domain of change (e.g., adolescent identity development) and have not emphasized other levels of organization within the ecology of human development (e.g., see Marcia 1980). Other scholars have taken a reductionist orientation to the phenomena of adolescence and have sought to use biogenic ideas (e.g., genetic or evolutionary biological ideas; see Bjorkland and Ellis, 2005) to interpret all psychological and social relationship phenomena of the period (see Elder 1980Elder , 1998Elder et al 2015, for critiques of the main effect or reductionist approaches).…”

Introduction to the Handbook of Life Course Health Development

“…Accordingly, the conceptual emphasis in RDS theories is placed on mutually influential relations between individuals and contexts, represented as individual ⇔ context relations. In a bidirectional relational system, the embeddedness within history (temporality) is of fundamental significance (Elder et al 2015). The presence of such temporality in the developmental system means that there always exists some potential for systematic change and, thus, for (relative) plasticity in human development.…”

“…In summary, the study of human development has evolved from a field dominated by split, reductionist (psychogenic or biogenic) approaches to a multidisciplinary field that integrates observations, evidence, and analysis that spans from biological to cultural and historical levels of organization across the life-span (e.g., Elder et al 2015;Ford and Lerner 1992;Gottlieb 1998;Lerner and Callina 2014). Reductionist accounts have given way to a more integrated framework associated with RDS metatheory (Overton 2015;Lerner 2006).…”

“…Reductionist accounts have given way to a more integrated framework associated with RDS metatheory (Overton 2015;Lerner 2006). Across the past several decades, several scholars have provided ideas contributing to the evolution of this metatheory (e.g., Baltes et al 2006;Bronfenbrenner 2005;Elder et al 2015;Lerner 2006;and, even earlier, see von Bertalanffy 1933).…”

“…Over the past several decades, countless studies have linked early life events and experiences with adult health conditions, delineating the developmental origins of common chronic health conditions and specifying the processes by which both adversity and opportunity are integrated into developing biobehavioral systems (Baltes et al 2006;Bronfenbrenner 2005;Elder et al 2015). As a result, there is a greater understanding of how health and disease develop, which is leading to new kinds of individual-and population-level strategies that have the potential to prevent disease and optimize health by minimizing the impact of adversity, increasing protective factors, and targeting health-promoting interventions to coincide with sensitive periods of health development.…”