ABSTRACT

Murray (1938), identified the life history as the “long unit” in the study of persons in transaction with their various environments. Indeed, the life history remains an ultimate challenge for providing a comprehensive, integrative account of an individual’s existence (Runyan, 1982). However, the obvious paucity of detailed observational records for an entire life course remains a daunting, and perhaps inevitable, limitation of life historical analysis. In this sense, life history analysis remains closer to history than to observational science (Craik, 1996; Lowenthal, 1985, 1996). Certainly, a complete naturalistic field recording of an individual’s lifelong environmental transactions is far beyond our current scientific capabilities.