Aging and Dying: a Life Course Perspective

Introduction

Aging is an inevitable; every person realizes that there is a beginning and an end.
Accepting death is a life-long learning experience but have many obstacles along the way. A convenient way to measure between time and human behavior is the life course perspective, this analyzes the chronological order of events from the time we are born to our death. The events that include socio-historical locations; timing of lives; geography, heterogeneity or variability; social ties to others; human agency and personal control; and how the past shapes the future. These several and basic tenets characterize the life perspective approach. This perspective uses a non-linear path to help us understand how we get to the individual as a senior. This makes sense because life itself is not linear and many events that occur in life can lead to twists and turns. The advantage of the life course perspective theory is that it focuses on multiple areas of life and how it inter-twine together similar to a web (Bengtson and Allen 1993).

Key Tenets and Discussion

Our path of development is rooted in and modified by conditions and events taking place during the historical period and the geographical location of the person’s household. Examples of these include economic cycles, geopolitical events, social and cultural beliefs. Recessions, wars, and the authority figure of the household shape our views and choices and change the progression of human development. This means that our choices are affected by interaction with people and families within the sociohistorical timeline, and not in a vacuum. The understanding the locations of various generations help researchers and policy makers to identify how to treat seniors from their respective life histories.

(Price, McKenry, and Murphy 2000) said they are three types of time that are central to life course perspective: individual time, generational time, and historical time. Individual

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