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Families in the Life Course: Interdependency of Roles, Role Configurations, and Pathways
Author(s) -
Macmillan Ross,
Copher Ronda
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
journal of marriage and family
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.578
H-Index - 159
eISSN - 1741-3737
pISSN - 0022-2445
DOI - 10.1111/j.1741-3737.2005.00180.x
Subject(s) - life course approach , interdependence , perspective (graphical) , context (archaeology) , family life , psychology , latent class model , life span , developmental psychology , sociology of the family , class (philosophy) , sociology , social psychology , epistemology , computer science , gerontology , social science , medicine , gender studies , paleontology , philosophy , artificial intelligence , machine learning , biology
Families are central in the unfolding life course. They have both internal and external dynamics that reflect and characterize the modern life span, and a life course perspective has particular utility for understanding the role and implications of families for individuals and society. The purpose of this paper is 3‐fold. First, we offer a family life course perspective that delineates core concepts of roles, role configurations, and pathways, specifies the links between them, and highlights the importance of linked lives and structural context. Second, we elaborate a latent class approach for modeling the multilayered dynamic interdependencies that characterize modern family life. Third, we provide an empirical example by considering the timing of childbearing, teen parenthood, and its place in the transition to adulthood using women's data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 ( N = 2,191). We conclude by discussing further avenues of family research that are enhanced with a life course approach and complementary latent structure methodology.