ABSTRACT
The combination of sociologists, psychologists and demographers looking at different aspects of human life and the confluence of interest in different phases of life, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, middle and old age, into one framework has sparked interest in human development as a process and led to new models and techniques. Hypotheses about the influence of early experiences on later life or the distinctions between the influence of chronological age as such on an individual's life experience and membership in a particular cohort can be tested with sufficient and adequate sets of data. The study of the human life course is a search for systematical regularities in events of unique meaning. The timing of one's life in comparison to one's parents and the meaning which norms and deviations give, can be constructed by the skill of the demographer.
