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Families, Social Change, and

Individual Lives
Glen H. Elder Jr.
Published online: 12 Oct 2008.

To cite this article: Glen H. Elder Jr. (2001) Families, Social Change, and Individual
Lives, Marriage & Family Review, 31:1-2, 187-203, DOI: 10.1300/J002v31n01_08

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 Families, Social Change,
and Individual Lives
Downloaded by [University of Liverpool] at 10:46 01 January 2015

Glen H. Elder, Jr.

KEYWORDS. Autobiography, adolescent development, employ-

ment, longitudinal research, socialization

INTRODUCTION

The 20th century is marked by one large-scale event after another

and their human consequences. As a child of World War II, these
consequences have long intrigued me. They also directed my atten-
tion to the family. Whether expressed in terms of long-run trends or
an economic depression and world war, social change has profound
implications for people through its impact on family relationships,
structures, and interactions. In this research problem, family life be-
comes a bridge between the macro-changes of society and the experi-
ences and life chances of individuals. A second type of research
problem has focused my attention on the family as a matrix of rela-
tionships, a matrix in which members’ lives are embedded and regulated
across the life span and generations. Individual lives are linked to other
lives through family and intergenerational ties.
Across the 1960s and early 1970s, I viewed these questions from a
perspective on socialization. But like much of social psychology,
this theoretical framework captures influences at a point in time. It
does not address the changes that take place in society, in commu-
nity and family, and in the lives of individuals. From this point to the
mid-1970s, I gradually shifted my theoretical perspective toward
the life course.1 This conceptual transition coincided with the theo-
retical and empirical tasks of following children from the early
1930s to mid-life. Publication of Children of the Great Depression

2001 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved. 187

 188 MARRIAGE & FAMILY REVIEW

(Elder, 1974, 1999) marked the beginning of this new stage of work,
as later expressed in Life Course Dynamics (Elder, 1985a), Children
in Time and Place (Elder, Modell, & Parke, 1993), and Children of
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the Land (Elder & Conger, 2000).

Time, process, and context are analytic themes that join the two
problem foci (on linking social change and individuals, and on
linked lives over time) in a framework that has become known as
life course theory (Elder, 1992, 1998a). Life course ideas and theory
emerged during the 1960s and 70s as longitudinal studies addressed
three challenging questions. As they followed children out of child-
hood and into the adult years (the 1960s), they had to come up with
ways of thinking about the evolution of lives over the life span and
generations. How are individual lives socially organized, and how
do they change? The study of people over time raised the question
of how changes in society made a difference in one’s life trajectory.
The realities of changing lives in changing times called for a way of
connecting the two sets of changes. A third task centered on the for-
mulation of developmental or aging concepts and mechanisms that
apply across the life span. These include concepts of cumulative ad-
vantage and disadvantage, turning points, life trajectory, and transi-
tion.
I have organized this short autobiographical essay around four
themes, beginning with “Early Influences” and my initial preoccu-
pation with socialization. This is followed by “Observing Families
and Lives Over Time,” a life stage devoted to the development of
Children of the Great Depression and the project’s influence on my
thinking about family and the life course. This work became a plat-
form from which to launch new studies of family and life course in
changing times. I underscore distinctive features of this profes-
sional stage under the theme “Studying Social Change in the Life
Course” and close with “Reflections.”

EARLY INFLUENCES

My undergraduate years at Penn State University (1952-57) in-

volved an intellectual journey from the biological sciences and agri-
culture through philosophy to the social sciences. Though born and
reared in Cleveland, Ohio, I ended up on a dairy farm in northeast-
ern Pennsylvania at the beginning of high school after my father
had carried out a life-long dream–acquiring his own farm. A fasci-
 Glen H. Elder, Jr. 189

nation with this new world of agriculture led me to Penn State Uni-
versity and its School of Agriculture, though issues of social science
eventually captured my attention.
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I remember meeting with the kindly Dean of Agriculture about

my “smorgasbord” curriculum, and he suggested that I call it “gen-
eral agriculture.” Jessie Bernard taught the only class I had in soci-
ology, and she encouraged my interest in family studies. Other
courses at the graduate-undergraduate level were in social psychol-
ogy, as taught by psychologists. The influence of Theodore New-
comb and Muzafir Sherif prompted me to think about links
between people and their groups, such as reference group attach-
ments and orientations. Social and personal change are vividly ex-
pressed in these experiences and in my early years in the fully
mobilized city of Cleveland during World War II.
Curricular changes during college left me uncertain about future
directions, but I pursued an interim assignment on the Dean of
Men’s staff at Kent State University in Kent, located just below
Cleveland and its suburbs. The Dean of Men, Glen Nygreen, had
received his PhD in Sociology at the University of Washington un-
der Charles Bowerman, a family sociologist who was trained by Er-
nest Burgess at the University of Chicago. With the Dean’s
encouragement, I chose to work on an MA thesis concerning social
change and family ties, the changing reference orientations of stu-
dents who enter college from large and small towns. This research
and my indirect ties to Charles Bowerman made the University of
North Carolina especially attractive to me as a program for doc-
toral work. Bowerman had just accepted an appointment as chair of
the Department of Sociology (1958–in the family field, Bowerman
replaced Reuben Hill, who had taken a position at the University of
Minnesota), and he had received a large NIMH grant to study the
parent-peer orientations of adolescents. I enthusiastically accepted
Bowerman’s offer of a research assistantship in the summer of
1958.
In many respects, the ideas in this project reflected postwar de-
velopments that segregated children from adults and established
fertile ground for the peer group as a countervailing influence to
the family. After World War II, an increasing proportion of youths
from all strata were enrolled in high school. And demographic
forces transformed the landscape of schooling as the “baby boom”
became a student surplus. With school time and peers gaining
 190 MARRIAGE & FAMILY REVIEW

prominence in the lives of youths, the family’s role became more

problematic to many. This theme appears in David Riesman’s The
Lonely Crowd (1950) and in James Coleman’s The Adolescent Soci-
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ety (1961). Many of the questions used in Coleman’s 1957 study

were included in the Bowerman project, despite a substantial dif-
ference in perspective and objectives. Coleman interpreted his data
as providing support for a view of the peer group as isolated from
the adult community and as an adversarial force vis-à-vis the family
in the lives of young people.
The parent-peer study established an “intellectual and social
community” across my five years of doctoral and postdoctoral work
(the latter supported by an NIMH fellowship), with an emphasis on
socialization as a link between social structure and personality. The
survey was planned as a school-based study of adolescent par-
ent-peer orientations from the 7th through the 12th grade. During
the spring of 1960, survey data were collected from 20,000 adoles-
cents in Ohio and in the Piedmont region of North Carolina. The
design called for the study of three orientations (affectional, asso-
ciational, and value) using the adolescent’s report on relations to
mother, father, and best friends (see Bowerman & Kinch, 1959).
This approach enabled Bowerman to assess the potential differen-
tiation of adolescent parent-peer orientations. In this manner, the
adolescent project challenged the “either-or” account of transitions
to adulthood–that youths develop an oppositional culture or follow
a pathway of normative continuity into adulthood.
My dissertation focused on the interrelationship of family struc-
ture, interactive processes, and adolescent orientations. Well be-
fore Diana Baumrind (1975) investigated authoritarian,
authoritative, and democratic patterns of childrearing, Bowerman’s
project collected information on these social structures, as per-
ceived by adolescents (see Elder, 1962a, 1962b, 1963; Bowerman &
Elder, 1964). The unidirectional structures (autocratic and authori-
tarian) were associated with low levels of perceived parental
warmth, the lack of explanation, and weak adolescent orientations
toward parents. These young people were more likely to be in-
volved in peer groups of an adversarial type. More democratic and
permissive structures were associated with greater perceived sup-
port from parents and explanation. Consistent with Baumrind’s au-
thoritative control, adolescent self-direction under parental control
became less restrictive over time, and parental explorations defined
 Glen H. Elder, Jr. 191

a pattern of independence socialization that produced high levels

of orientation toward parents in affection, values, and activities.
Parents and peers were more often allies in this family environ-
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ment. The dissertation and post-doctoral studies were published

under the title of Family Structure and Socialization (Elder, 1980) in
an Arno Press series under the direction of Robert K. Merton.
A preoccupation with issues of change represents a defining
theme of The Adolescent Project. The changing social position of
youths shaped many of the study’s concerns; the separation of
young people from parental influence, and the accentuation of sep-
arate worlds as youths move toward the adult years. However, the
study did not address relevant aspects of historical or developmen-
tal change, or their interrelationship. Available theory and research
models were largely ahistorical, and the cross-sectional design did
not permit actual study of family relationships and individual devel-
opment over time.
As I completed my dissertation and moved into a one-year post-
doctoral fellowship, sociologists were beginning to think about such
matters. I encountered a little book with a very big message. In The
Sociological Imagination, C. Wright Mills proposed the “study of bi-
ography, of history, and of the problems of their intersection within
social structure” as an orienting concept in the behavioral sciences
(1959, p. 149). However, we were still years away from working mod-
els that would bring this kind of study to life. Little did I know that
my first career appointment, at the University of California-Berke-
ley, would give me a chance to work on such problems.
During my search for job opportunities (1961-62), Bowerman ar-
ranged an interview at Chapel Hill with John Clausen, a distin-
guished sociologist who had just become the new director of the
Institute of Human Development at Berkeley. Bowerman and
Clausen were longtime friends, dating back to prewar graduate
studies at the University of Chicago. In retrospect, the job interview
ensured a lasting imprint of the early Chicago School of Sociology
on my work (see Abbott, 1999). As mentor, Bowerman strength-
ened my investment in family studies with a Burgess perspective on
the family, as a “unity of interacting personalities.” After I accepted
Clausen’s offer (a joint appointment in the Department of Sociol-
ogy and the Institute of Human Development), I began to value the
study of individual lives, as John had from research at the Chicago
Institute of Juvenile Research. Even more importantly, the longitu-
dinal samples at the Institute challenged me to think of families and
 192 MARRIAGE & FAMILY REVIEW

individuals over time. With rich archival data over nearly 30 years, I
could see family life in the experience of individuals, and the role of
individual lives in family experience. These impressions had a last-
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ing imprint on my studies of families and the life course.

OBSERVING FAMILIES AND LIVES OVER TIME

My transition to Berkeley, the Institute of Human Development

and the Department of Sociology at the University of California,
occurred at a momentous time for the social and behavioral sci-
ences on the campus and more generally. And it placed me on a new
life trajectory based on a deeper consideration of the large-scale
changes in human society and the longitudinal study of people over
many years in changing worlds.
Established in the 1950s under the leadership of Herbert
Blumer, the Berkeley Department of Sociology quickly became a
magnet for distinguished senior faculty. When I arrived in the late
summer of 1962, this faculty included Kingsley Davis, Reinhard
Bendix, Seymour Martin Lipset, Philip Selznick, Erving Goffman,
Neil Smelser, John Clausen, Herbert Blumer, Martin Trow,
Charles Glock, David Matza, and Hanan Selvin, among others.
Harold Wilensky joined the faculty a year later and became an im-
portant source of ideas in my thinking about families and lives over
time. Psychology was likewise staffed with many leading figures in
the field, and the Institute of Human Development had become a
pioneering institution in the study of human development from
early childhood into the middle years with its three long-term longi-
tudinal studies.
With a joint appointment in Sociology and at the Institute, I had
a rare opportunity to bring both sociological and psychological
models to my research. My assignment at the Institute entailed the
coding of life history interview data on all members of the Oakland
Growth Study (members born in 1920-21). At the time, I did not
fully anticipate the dramatic contrast between the cross-sectional
Adolescent Study (resembling the storied Platte River, “a mile wide
and an inch deep”) and 30 years or more of data on families and
lives. Survey work blinded me to the temporal thinking and ques-
tions that are appropriate for longitudinal research. The three stud-
ies at the Institute (in addition to Oakland, the Berkeley Guidance
Study, and the Berkeley Growth Study) amounted to a sample of
 Glen H. Elder, Jr. 193

more than 500 people (Eichorn, Clausen, Haan, Honzik, & Mussen,
1981). The Oakland Study (N = 167) obtained annual information
from Study members, mothers, and peers from 1931-32 through
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1936-38, and then in the mid-1950s, 1960, and 1965. Observational

data were available on peer interactions. Building upon these waves
of data, I worked with staff to construct life records in different ar-
eas, such as family, career, and health.
My experience with the Oakland archive was shaped by observa-
tions that reinforced a more temporal approach to families and
lives. The most dramatic example had to do with the ever-changing
circumstances of families in the Great Depression. I soon realized
that static concepts of family SES and the division of labor would
not capture the realities of changing families. This is when I began
to think of the division of labor in a processual family economy.
Family adaptations to income loss became a process by which fami-
lies constructed their own life course. One set of adaptations en-
tailed a shift in the family economy from capital to labor-intensive
activity.
These conceptual changes were the initial steps in launching a
study of “Children of the Great Depression.” The observation of
family patterns over time also provided insights concerning the un-
derlying economic forces that prompted new adaptations and struc-
tures. Such observations also prompted more thought about how to
conceptualize individual lives. Two perspectives were available at
the time, career and life cycle, and neither proved satisfactory (El-
der, 1998a, 1998b). The career model dealt with single careers and
thus oversimplified the lives of people who were coping with multi-
ple roles at the same time. The concept of life cycle proved a role
theoretical account of role sequences and linked lives, but it did not
locate people according to their life stage or historical context. And
it did not view roles in terms of their time of entry and exit.
To correct these limitations, I added to the life cycle model of
role relationships the varied meanings of age, historical and social,
in developing an approach to the Oakland study. Neither perspec-
tive was adequate by itself. Linked relationships in the life cycle en-
abled me to understand how economic hardship influenced
children through the family. And it proved helpful in thinking about
socialization and the sequential roles of adult life. But age distinc-
tions were required to place families in history and to mark the
transitions of adult life. The meanings of age brought temporality to
the project.
 194 MARRIAGE & FAMILY REVIEW

In the late 1960s, I was invited to return to the University of

North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and I brought with me a draft of
Children of the Great Depression as well as essential data files. Fol-
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lowing additional editorial work, the book was accepted for publi-
cation by the University of Chicago Press, with publication
scheduled for 1974. Four theoretical principles of life course theory
emerged from the study (Elder, 1998a).
Born in 1920-21, the Oakland study members entered childhood
during this prosperous time, and then encountered family hardships
as young adolescents through the misfortunes of their parents and
relatives. Their historical time placed them at risk of this
deprivational event. Some were exposed to severe deprivations
through the family, whereas others managed to avoid them alto-
gether. These contrasting experiences, deprived and nondeprived,
produced an “experiment in nature” with empirical findings that af-
firm the principle of (1) historical time and place: that the life course of
individuals is embedded in and shaped by the historical times and places
they experience over their lifetime.
Within their lifetime, the Oakland Study members encountered
differences in the temporal order of major events. Some married
early and others late. Early marriage tended to generate a
cumulation of life disadvantages, such as economic difficulties and
the loss of advanced education. Whether early or late, the timing of
life transitions proved to have long-term consequences through
their effects on subsequent events and choices. The principle of (2)
timing in lives asserts that: the developmental antecedents and conse-
quences of life transitions, events, and behavior patterns vary accord-
ing to their timing in a person’s life.
Historical and individual experiences are connected through the
family and the interdependent fates of its members. Fates are
shared through family relationships. For example, economic hard-
ship tended to increase the explosiveness of men who were inclined
toward irritability. Thus, the more explosive they became under
mounting economic pressures, the more adversely it affected the
quality of marital relations and parenting. These observations sup-
port the principle of (3) linked lives: individual lives are lived interde-
pendently, and social-historical influences are expressed through this
network of shared relationships.
Lastly, the economic collapse of the 30s brings to mind a “world
out of control,” and the Oakland families often worked out success-
ful responses in dire circumstances. Parents and their children
 Glen H. Elder, Jr. 195

made choices and many engaged in effective survival strategies

within available options and limitations. These behaviors are ex-
pressions of human agency. The principle of (4) human agency states
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that: individuals construct their own life course through the choices
and actions they take within the opportunities and constraints of his-
tory and social circumstances.
In this manner, empirical observations from the study illustrate
core principles of life course theory. I use the term “theory” to refer
to a theoretical orientation and framework (see Merton, 1968). Life
course theory defines a common field of inquiry by providing a
framework on matters of problem identification and conceptual de-
velopment. In terms of theory, the empirical findings of this work
did not support a life outcome of cumulative disadvantage from
Depression hardship. Whether deprived in the middle or working
class, the Oakland men and women typically fared well in their
adult years. The concept of turning point better fits their life course.
Three influences played a role in this turnaround–advanced educa-
tion, marriage, and, especially, military service.
This next phase of my career moved beyond Children of the Great
Depression in a number of respects. First, responses to the book
called for clarifications and elaborations of life course distinctions,
and broadened my cross-disciplinary contacts in history (Elder,
1977, 1978; Hareven, 1978) and developmental psychology (Elder,
1998b). Second, questions of generality arose. Are the findings
from this study likely to generalize to other birth cohorts, and to
other times and places? Theories of cohort differentiation led me to
expect little generalization across time and place. The issue of
generalizability was addressed by comparing the Oakland cohort
with a younger cohort, the Berkeley Guidance sample, with birth
years of 1928-29; and by exploring the impact of economic hardship
in the contemporary world of inner-city Philadelphia (Furstenberg,
Cook, Eccles, Elder, & Sameroff, 1999) and rural Iowa (Conger &
Elder, 1994). Third, we had to explain how so many men and
women from the Oakland cohort fared as well as they did in life,
given their economic disadvantage. What were the key turning
points?

STUDYING SOCIAL CHANGE IN THE LIFE COURSE

 196 MARRIAGE & FAMILY REVIEW

Children of the Great Depression generated considerable interest

among developmental psychologists and social historians. Psychol-
ogists saw the work as an effort to place developmental processes in
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context (see Bronfenbrenner, 1977, 1979), while a small group of

young social historians found the perspective of life course an ap-
pealing alternative to that of the life cycle. I met with some histori-
ans in Boston during the winter of 1975, and this meeting
(organized by Tamara Hareven of Clark University) led to a series
of workshops and a full week conference on the life course during
the summer of 1976 at Williams College. Hareven and her col-
leagues saw the life course as a more dynamic theory of family
change and adaptation than family cycle models, largely through its
attention to historical time and social timing. The Williams College
conference applied life course theory to 1880 census data on Essex
County, Massachusetts. The resulting papers have been published
in Hareven’s Transitions: The Family and Life Course in Historical
Perspective (1978). In 1976, Hareven became the first editor of the
Journal of Family History and actively encouraged the publication of
life course studies.
Another important step to elaborate and apply life course theory
to families and individual lives occurred in 1977 when I was invited
to join the new Social Science Research Council Committee on Life
Course Perspectives on Human Development, with its multidisci-
plinary membership (including psychologists Paul Baltes and M.
Brewster Smith–see Elder, 1985). This committee, initially chaired
by Matilda Riley, continued into the mid-1980s with a shift toward
child development (psychologists included Mavis Hetherington,
Ross Parke, Judy Dunn, and Martin Seligman). The meetings were
frequently organized around the investigation of life course ques-
tions with longitudinal data sets, such as the Panel Study of Income
Dynamics and the Framingham Study.
In the 1980s, an important project sponsored by the Committee
brought historians and developmentalists together around life
course themes by pairing them on individual studies. Each disci-
pline had something different to offer. Historians brought a contex-
tual understanding to the endeavor; whereas, developmentalists
shed light on biobehavioral processes across the life span, some-
thing historians knew little about. The project was published as
Children in Time and Place (Elder, Modell, & Parke, 1993). Leg-
acies of the Committee’s labors included a greater appreciation of
 Glen H. Elder, Jr. 197

the developmental and aging implications of the life course, and of

historical constraints on development.
In the course of working on Children of the Great Depression, I be-
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came increasingly aware of the need for a comparative cohort in or-

der to place the empirical results in context. After the book was
published, this necessity gained more importance in my mind, as
did the need to ascertain how the Second World War affected the
men and women who grew up in the Great Depression. Children
told the story of this Depression childhood and its legacy, but it
completely failed to explore the implications of World War II and
the Korean War. Over 90 percent of the Oakland men served in
World War II, and nearly three-fourths of the Berkeley Guidance
Study men also served in the military. After exploring the compara-
tive cohort plan, I settled on the Berkeley Guidance sample as the
very best option. The sample included 214 boys and girls who were
born in 1928-29. The study members were followed up across child-
hood, adolescent years, and the middle years.
Work on the Berkeley Guidance Study archive occurred during a
sabbatical year in 1972-73, and it led to the unsurprising finding that
members of this younger birth cohort were more adversely influ-
enced by prolonged exposure to the Depression’s hardship, than
members of the Oakland cohort. This negative impact was most evi-
dent among the boys. Yet despite this disadvantage, it did not per-
sist beyond the age of 40 or so, owing largely to turning point
experiences in the military, especially during the Second World
War. In both cohorts, men who entered the military at an early
stage were most likely to benefit, more so than men who entered
late (Elder, 1986, 1987). Early entry minimized life disruption and
opened up the opportunity for educational benefits on the GI bill.
Later entry (32 years or more) tended to increase life disadvantage,
such as the risk of divorce and worklife disruptions, as revealed in
another California cohort (Pavalko & Elder, 1990; Elder,
Shanahan, & Clipp, 1994). Other samples and analyses have pro-
duced comparable findings (Sampson & Laub, 1996). The Second
World War also opened up job and educational opportunities for
young women who had grown up in the 30s, and, when coupled with
marriage, they frequently defined an escape route from Depression
hard times.
Military duty and wartime service illustrate the role of the state in
shaping the life course through manpower policies (Mayer, 1986).
Another effort to examine this role took me to Shanghai and a life
 198 MARRIAGE & FAMILY REVIEW

course study of the Cultural Revolution in the People’s Republic of

China, just prior to the crisis of Tiananmen Square (Elder, Wu, &
Yuan, 1993). In collaboration with the Institute of Sociology
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(Shanghai University) and the Carolina Population Center at Cha-

pel Hill, we used retrospective life history methods in a survey of
1,300 adults in Shanghai during the winter and spring of 1987-88.
Among urban young people who were sent to peasant communities,
the disruptive forces and sanctions of the forced migration led to
the postponement of family events and to some losses of education
and career prospects. Since longitudinal samples are not available
in developing societies, this study demonstrated the potential of us-
ing retrospective life history techniques for recovering knowledge
about the enduring effects of prior events.
Each of these studies enabled men to apply life course theory to
different types of social change and to use the results to refine the
conceptual approach. I continued this method of extending life
course theory through different applications when I returned to the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1984 as the Howard
W. Odum Distinguished Professor of Sociology. I had just spent
several years at the new Boys Town Center for Studies of Youth
and Families (Omaha, Nebraska), and five years as Urie
Bronfenbrenner’s colleague at Cornell University.
Entirely new projects captured my attention. When hard times
visited the rural midwest in the 80s with a sudden collapse of land
values, I joined an Iowa State research team headed by Rand Con-
ger on a panel study of economic hardship and its effects with over
450 farm and nonfarm families. Focused on the north central re-
gion of the state, the study drew upon elements of my earlier De-
pression study to trace economic hardship through families
processes to the lives of parents and children (Conger & Elder,
1994). Indebtedness, income loss, and unstable work increased the
felt economic pressures of Iowa families, and also increased the
likelihood of parental emotional distress and marital negativity.
These conditions tended to undermine effective parenting and the
developmental competence of young people.
But many factors countered such cumulative adversities, includ-
ing a web of social relationships linking family members and the
household to community institutions. These social connections are
most evident among families with some ties to agriculture, despite
their economic distress. The developmental and protective influ-
ence of these “connections” is reported in a forthcoming book,
 Glen H. Elder, Jr. 199

Children of the Land (Elder & Conger, in press), along with insights
gained from the ways these families managed the risks and options
of their children beyond the household. This life course study over
seven years (from 7th grade to completion of high school) under-
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scored the importance of investigating whether and how families

are linked to the outside world.
Paired with the Iowa Youth and Families Project was a project in
inner-city Philadelphia, also focused on how parents manage the
risks and options of their children (ages 11-14), this time in danger-
ous environments. Directed by Frank Furstenberg (with Cook,
Eccles, Elder, & Sameroff, 1999), this study found that family re-
sources and strategies proved to be more potent in fostering suc-
cessful outcomes in young people (in academic achievement, social
involvement, emotional health, and the avoidance of problem be-
havior). There were greater differences within particular neighbor-
hoods, among families and children, than there were between
them. As in the Iowa study, involved parents tended to have chil-
dren who were actively engaged in school clubs and sports. They
were also likely to do better academically.
The MacArthur Network on Successful Adolescent Develop-
ment among Youth in High-Risk Settings supported both the Iowa
and Philadelphia studies and enabled us to investigate similar fam-
ily processes in these different settings. Thus, we found community
ties and their developmental benefits in both rural communities
and in the inner city. However, such ties are more common in a ru-
ral community, and they are more supported by other social forces.
Both studies affirm the developmental influence of “linked lives”
between the family and other groups in the community. The social
ecology of families represents a powerful force in the lives of chil-
dren, whatever the external danger or risk.

REFLECTIONS

The last half of the 20th century has witnessed a number of intel-
lectual transitions that are expressed in the path I have followed in
sociology and the behavioral sciences. These include the increasing
tendency to view behavior and collective life in context; to bring an
historical perspective to all problems; and to appreciate the tempo-
rality of families and of people’s lives. For reasons that are not easy
to identify, I have always been challenged by the powerful implica-
 200 MARRIAGE & FAMILY REVIEW

tions of a changing society for people’s lives, a topic that was ne-
glected at the time I entered graduate school. Sociologists had little
to contribute to an understanding of social change.
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Nevertheless, a changeful time should direct at least some atten-

tion to the consequences in people’s lives, especially with the ad-
vantage of longitudinal data. I began to discover valuable insights
about these effects by focusing on the family in the Great Depres-
sion, drawing from the tradition of social interactionism and social-
ization studies. Hard times were expressed in different ways
through family adaptations, such as changing the family economy to
a more labor intensive system. By studying changing lives in chang-
ing times, I gradually assembled elements of a life course frame-
work or theoretical orientation, incorporating socialization issues
within this broader frame. With the assistance of talented col-
leagues and students, my studies of other social changes also fos-
tered an elaboration of this perspective, such as manpower
mobilization in World War II and rural economic change.
My professional journey in the study of families and lives might
well have taken a different course without access to the pioneering
longitudinal studies. The growth of longitudinal data archives is
truly remarkable in the social and behavioral sciences, and studies
based on them have profoundly influenced my thinking about fami-
lies and their members. In many cases, I have taken longitudinal
data that were collected for other purposes and recast them to fit
the new questions I wanted to address.2 In other cases I collected
data explicitly for the purposes of assessing these questions. In ei-
ther case, new data collection methods (such as retrospective life
calendars) were needed to address life course questions on family
dynamics and continuity.
Today life course studies are helping to locate people in a matrix
of age-graded, family relationships, and to place families in the so-
cial structures, cultures, and populations of time and place.3 The
studies have brought time and temporality to an understanding of
individual lives and families. In various ways, both large and small,
this line of work is serving to counter what Robert Nisbet (1969, ch.
8) once called the “timeless realm of the abstract.”

NOTES
 Glen H. Elder, Jr. 201

1. This transition is discussed in my Ernest Burgess lecture (Elder, 1981a), in

an essay critical of the temporal limitations of the social structure and personality
framework (Elder, 1981b), and most extensively in my Cooley-Mead address pub-
lished in 1994. A biographical account of the longitudinal studies and their influ-
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ences on my thinking is reported in a paper for the Landmark Studies Conference

of the Henry Murray Research Center (Elder, in press).
2. Our methods for “recasting” data archives to meet the needs of a new type of
question are reported by Elder, Pavalko, and Clipp (1993) in Working with Archival
Data. A general anthology of life course methods has been edited by Giele and El-
der (1998).
3. Anne Colby (Giele and Elder, 1998, p. viii) refers to “the tremendous impact
on social science that the life course approach has had in the past three decades.”
She concludes that “the establishment of this approach . . . is one of the most im-
portant achievements of social science in the second half of the 20th century” (p.
x).

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