ABSTRACT
During the past two decades the broad outlines of a life-course perspective on the study of individual lives began to emerge in the social sciences (Hagestad &. Neugarten 1985). This perspective expanded the research framework of social scientists from studies of correlations between a few variables measured at a single point in time to causal models of dynamic processes (Allison 1984; Hogan 1985). It has provided a linkage between researchers from anthropology, sociology, and developmental psychology, enabling social scientists to go beyond narrow disciplinary boundaries in their research (Sørensen, Weinert, & Sherrod 1986).
