ABSTRACT
The primary interest in assessing calendar time in the study of development and aging is in the prediction of the occurrence, duration, and timing of significant behavioral events. There have been many admonitions in the literature on adult development regarding the multidimensional nature of events for populations as well as individuals. This chapter shows that many definitions of event time would be independent of chronological age; hence, the indeterminacy posed by the age-period-cohort model can be successfully resolved by substituting event time for the traditional concept of calendar time. From the point of view of researchers in the field of human aging, examination of event time over large portions of the adult life span would allow testing hypotheses regarding the differentiation and dedifferentiation of the event space at various adult life stages. The independent variables in event time analyses represent the conditional probabilities attributable to mediating influences; they can be both fixed in time or can be time-varying.
