Questions to Guide your Reading

Elder, MEL Chapter 4

The Life Course Paradigm: Social Change and Individual Development

1. Understanding the development of individuals requires understanding their lives in time and place, the role of agency, and the timing and linkages of lives.

1. What do each of these concepts mean?

2. Sometimes it is easiest to understand concepts by examples that compare and contrast. Consider trying to understand the life course of adults with learning disabilities, for example, to understand how learning disabilities might impact adult development and personal/social achievement. If you were looking at adults age 25-45, what are some other critical ways in which you might want to consider individual differences within this group—i.e., other considerations along which you might create subgroups. Why?

3. Similarly, think about various ethnic groups living in Lowell and the surrounding area. In what ways can Elder’s perspective help us to best understand, for example, the “Cambodian experience” in Lowell?

2. Elder discusses notions of age graded developmental norms and expectations as coloring much of adult development. Think about how these help us understand “off time” transitions that occur around negative events that in adult life, transitions such as loss of employment, divorce, stroke or illness. What is the difference between thinking about designing a program for stroke patients and their families from a traditional rehabilitation and a developmental point of view?

3. Migration is frequently considered only in terms of benefits (e.g., immigrants to the “land of opportunity”). In what ways does Elder point to costs as well as benefits?