ABSTRACT
Another problem is that such an essay takes a linear view of a life. While that is how the life course is often studied, it is hard to take into account the experiences that were available (as well as those that were not), the take-up of some of these experiences (since some choice is involved), the rejection of some of these experiences (again, choice), and the likelihood that some chosen experiences lead to others. Economists talk about constraints and opportunities as well as information leading to the take-up (or not) of a particular experience. Sociologists look at how social stratification limits experiences for some. Life-course theorists use such terms as opportunities, constraints, turning points, knifing points, cascades, and recursive pathways to describe these phenomena. Psychologists consider the cognitive, emotional, and biological processes that underlie how individuals respond to various experiences and even how open individuals are to various experiences. They are often interested in changes in these processes as a function of development as well as experience and well as the individual differences seen across individuals within the same environment. Biologists are concerned with how experiences get under the skin and how experiences alter biological systems. Some of these phenomena include biological reactivity to events, different genetic sensitivity to environment events, cumulative stressors, and allostatic load. Of course, this description is quite simplistic, in that overlap occurs across disciplines. In fact, my career has been all about integrating insights from the various approaches to better understand development through time and place. However, disciplines seem to like their theories to be distinct. In a revision of an article for the American Journal of Public Health, our group attempted to outline a life course developmental theory (we were trying to show how the use of such a framework
would enhance the exciting emerging work on differential genetic sensitivity to the environment (Mitchell et al., in press); two reviewers mentioned that the life course and the developmental frameworks were separate and should not be combined, which led to a mini-discourse on how the two differ rather than on how they are similar.
