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The life course as a theoretical orientation: Sequences of person‐situation interaction 1
Author(s) -
Runyan William McKinley
Publication year - 1978
Publication title -
journal of personality
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.082
H-Index - 144
eISSN - 1467-6494
pISSN - 0022-3506
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-6494.1978.tb00187.x
Subject(s) - life course approach , psychology , orientation (vector space) , perspective (graphical) , sequence (biology) , course (navigation) , personality , social psychology , cognitive psychology , artificial intelligence , computer science , physics , geometry , mathematics , astronomy , biology , genetics
A bstract The life course is proposed as a theoretical orientation concerned with the problems of describing, understanding, generalizing about, predicting, and intentionally changing the course of lives. A life course orientation provides a framework for analyzing the causal and probabilistic structure of the course of experience in individual lives, groups of lives, and lives in general. The life course can be conceptualized as a sequence of person‐situation interactions, or as a sequence of behavior‐determining, person‐determining, and situation‐determining processes. This perspective is illustrated through an analysis of the careers of heroin users, and through a critical examination of several common strategies for predicting behavior. The study of lives is distinguished from the study of personality, and the historical and theoretical background for a life course orientation is briefly reviewed.