ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the examinations of life course processes in light of their implications for the study of both the variability of individual trajectories and the institutional patterning of variability. Two themes in these studies will be considered. The first is individualization, or what is referred to in aging research as the thesis of heterogeneity, an idea supported principally by longitudinal demographic research on populations in advanced western societies (particularly the U. S.). Second is the specification of social structure. There are alternative approaches to structuration: chief among these are what might be referred to as traditional institutional examinations and relational approaches. Both have developed rapidly in the new structuralism benefiting from methodological innovations in multilevel modeling and network analysis and from growing databases that span social contexts. Each makes a distinctive contribution to the analysis of structure.
