ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the two approaches to the study of the demography of life-span transitions. The first has used data on transitions to describe the experience of the population, and of subgroups within the population, in regard to the average timing of life-course transitions. The second approach concentrates on causal analyses of transition processes. The chapter describes that the first approach is fundamentally misleading because: the life-span transitions of individuals often are used to infer demographic life cycles for families; and concentration on the average experiences of a population artifactually produce the impression of homogeneity in life-span transitions, giving rise to notions of demographic stages. These errors cause the analyst to ignore interindividual differences in the timing and coordination of demographic transitions, obscuring temporal and social structural influences on the organization of activities over the life span. The chapter provides a brief discussion of appropriate research methods for life-course studies of the timing and coordination of demographic transitions.
