What are the most effective methods for doing life-course research? In this volume, the field's founders and leaders answer this question, giving readers tips on: the art and method of the appropriate research design; the collection of life-history data; and the search for meaningful patterns to be found in the results.

Giele and Elder introduce the life course approach, show how it developed and what it entails, consider how to collect and organise longitudinal data, and explore the analysis and interpretation of life course data.

This book brings together prominent investigators to provide a comprehensive guide to doing life course research, including an “inside view” of how they designed and carried out influential longitudinal studies. Using vivid examples, the contributors trace the connections between early and later experience and reveal how researchers and graduate students can discover these links in their own research. Well-organized chapters describe the best and newest ways to: *Use surveys, life records, ethnography, and data archives to collect different types of data over years or even decades. *Apply innovative statistical methods to measure dynamic processes that result in improvement, decline, or reversibility in economic fortune, stress, health, and criminality. *Explore the micro- and macro-level explanatory factors that shape individual trajectories, including genetic and environmental interactions, personal life history, interpersonal ties, and sociocultural institutions.

Giele and Elder introduce the life course approach, show how it developed and what it entails, consider how to collect and organise longitudinal data, and explore the analysis and interpretation of life course data.

Building on the success of the 2003 Handbook of the Life Course, this second volume identifies future directions for life course research and policy. The introductory essay and the chapters that make up the five sections of this book, show consensus on strategic “next steps” in life course studies. These next steps are explored in detail in each section: Section I, on life course theory, provides fresh perspectives on well-established topics, including cohorts, life stages, and legal and regulatory contexts. It challenges life course scholars to move beyond common individualistic paradigms. Section II highlights changes in major institutional and organizational contexts of the life course. It draws on conceptual advances and recent empirical findings to identify promising avenues for research that illuminate the interplay between structure and agency. It examines trends in family, school, and workplace, as well as contexts that deserve heightened attention, including the military, the criminal justice system, and natural and man-made disaster. The remaining three sections consider advances and suggest strategic opportunities in the study of health and development throughout the life course. They explore methodological innovations, including qualitative and three-generational longitudinal research designs, causal analysis, growth curves, and the study of place. Finally, they show ways to build bridges between life course research and public policy.

This book examines consumer behavior using the “life course” paradigm, a multidisciplinary framework for studying people's lives, structural contexts, and social change. It contributes to marketing research by providing new insights into the study of consumer behavior and illustrating how to apply the life course paradigm’s concepts and theoretical perspectives to study consumer topics in an innovative way. Although a growing number of marketing researchers, either implicitly or explicitly, subscribe to life course perspectives for studying a variety of consumer behaviors, their efforts have been limited due to a lack of theories and methods that would help them study consumers over the lifecycle. When studying consumers over their lifespan, researchers examine differences in the consumer behaviors of various age groups (e.g., children, baby boomers, elderly, etc.) or family life stages (e.g., bachelors, full nesters, empty nesters, etc.), inferring that consumer behavior changes over time or linking consumption behaviors to previous experiences and future expectations. Such efforts, however, have yet to benefit from an interdisciplinary research approach. This book fills this gap in consumer research by informing readers about the differences between some of the most commonly used models for studying consumers over their lifespan and the life course paradigm, and providing implications for research, public policy, and marketing practice. Presenting applications of the life course approach in such research topics as decision making, maladaptive behaviors (e.g., compulsive buying, binge eating), consumer well-being, and cognitive decline, this book is beneficial for students, scholars, professors, practitioners, and policy makers in consumer behavior, consumer research, consumer psychology, and marketing research.

Life course epidemiology is concerned with the origins of risk, resilience, and the processes of ageing, and how this information can be of value in a public health context - particularly for preventive health care. Its challenge is to discover, develop and analyse sources of data that cover many years of life, especially the early developmental period when, it is thought, some fundamental aspects of lifetime health begin. It also analyses genetic propensity and environmental exposures. The rapid development of life course epidemiology, in parallel with new work on developmental biology and the biology of ageing, has bought innovative and ingenious methods of data collection. These require new methodological techniques for the design of observational and quasi-experimental studies of life course pathways to adult health. This book describes these developments, together with arguments for improving the measurement of the social environment and its role in developing individual vulnerability or adaptation. The development of bio-bank large-scale population studies for the investigation of genetic effects is discussed, alongside the challenges this creates for the epidemiologist. The changing design of studies, increasing flow of longitudinal data, management of data, analytic challenges, timing, and both traditional and more recent methods of managing these features in the study of causality, are discussed. Life course epidemiology has an essential role in developing methods to evaluate precisely the impact of interacting developmental, environmental, and genetic effects, knowledge of which is fundamental for the design of effective prevention strategies in public health, as well as for the advancement of understanding in the broader spheres of health and medicine.