Encyclopedia of SociologyVol._3

life-cycle and life-course conceptualizations is perhaps overdrawn.

The life-cycle model retains many valuable features that are typically missing from life-course studies. Life-course transitions focus on individuals at particular times during their lives (adolescents becoming adults, older workers becoming disabled or retired). While past experiences and current opportunities are often included in lifecourse models, the life-course perspective has not lent itself well to viewing transitions at particular ages in the context of the lifelong process of aging, an idea that is innate in the life-cycle approach. Economic research, which is theoretically driven and uses a life-cycle model, has been most successful at integrating findings from transitions at a given age into the lifetimes of individuals.

With such an approach it is also possible to simulate the effects of changes in transition rates (resulting from heterogeneity in rates and changes in population composition) on cohort-life cycle behaviors. The life-course perspective typically views cohorts as proxies for age-specific experiences with the social structure; the life-cycle model brings a necessary emphasis on intercohort change as a method of social innovation.

The life-course approach emphasizes variability in transitions and trajectories to such an extent that many social scientists have neglected regularities and consistencies in behaviors, and the advantages they may entail. There is a great deal of research on adolescent mothers but relatively little research on why married women have children. There is more interest in unemployment and poverty than in the advantages of paid employment and career lines. While children of welfare mothers disproportionately go on to become welfare mothers themselves (the subject of much research), the overwhelming majority grow up to be free of welfare dependence (a subject about which we know very little). Nor do we have a strong explanation of the reasons persons marry. The life-cycle approach draws attention to these questions of social organization, and the matching of individual behaviors to necessary social roles.

FUTURE OF LIFE CYCLE

The life cycle thus remains a viable and valuable conceptual tool for studying human lives. In much

of the developing world, transitions and trajectories are sufficiently universal and age regulated that the life-cycle model remains a highly useful tool for social science. In societies where such regularities are no longer the norm, the life-course approach is the more appropriate. To be meaningful, the life course must be interpreted in light of the life cycle—the underlying beliefs about the shape and timing of the life stages to understand the social meanings of age, identify alternative pathways for life trajectories, draw attention to the strong regularities in transition behaviors and linkages, and direct attention to intercohort stability and change. The concept of the life cycle thus will continue to be a valuable and necessary tool for the social sciences.

(SEE ALSO: Life Course)

Further Readings

Erikson, Erik H. 1968 ‘‘Life Cycle.’’ Pp. 286–292 in David L. Sills, ed., International Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 9. New York: Mcmillan Free Press.

Glick, Paul C. and Robert Parke, Jr. 1965 ‘‘New Approaches in Studying the Life Cycle of the Family.’’

Demography 2:187–202.

Greenwood, M. J. 1997 ‘‘Internal Migration in Developed Countries.’’ Pp. 647–720 in Mark R. Rosenzweig and Oded Stark, eds., Handbook of Population and Family Economics, vol. 1B. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Hotz, V. J., J. A. Klerman, and R. J. Willis 1997 ‘‘The Economics of Fertility in Developed Countries: A Survey.’’ Pp. 275–347 in Mark R. Rosenzweig and Oded Stark, eds., Handbook of Population and Family Economics, vol. 1A. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

O’Rand, Angela M. and Margaret L. Krecker 1990 ‘‘Concepts of the Life Cycle: Their History, Meanings, and Uses in the Social Sciences.Annual Review of Sociology 16:241–262.

Riley, Matilda White 1985 ‘‘Age Strata in Social Systems.’’ Pp. 369–411 in Robert H. Binstock and Ethel Shanas, eds., Handbook of Aging and the Social Sciences, 2nd ed. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold.

DENNIS P. HOGAN

LIFE EXPECTANCY

Life expectancy (or the expectation of life) is the average length of life remaining to be lived by a

population at a given age. It is computed in the process of building a life table and can be computed for any age in the life table. Life expectancy at birth is the most commonly presented value because this measure provides a succinct indicator of mortality that reflects mortality conditions across the age range and is unaffected by the age structure of the actual population and thus can be compared across populations. The symbol used to represent life expectancy is x where x represents an exact age.

LIFE EXPECTANCY IN THE UNITED

STATES

In 1996, life expectancy at birth, 0, in the United States was 76.1 years; at age 65, 65 was 17.5 years; and at age 85, 85 was 6.1 years (Anderson 1998). These figures can be interpreted to mean that if a baby born in 1996 were exposed to the mortality conditions existing at each age of the life span in 1996, the baby with an average length life would live 76.1 years.

PERIOD AND COHORT VALUES OF LIFE

EXPECTANCY

The 1996 U.S. life table is a period life table, based on cross-sectional data collected over a year; thus, this life table indicates the mortality experience of a hypothetical cohort. No actual cohort ever experiences the mortality in a period or cross-sectional life table; rather, the table indicates mortality conditions if the mortality levels of each age group at the period of time used as a reference were experienced by the hypothetical cohort. Because mortality has been falling over time, period life tables for a cohort’s year of birth have indicated an average expected length of life that is lower than that actually achieved by the cohort. For instance, in 1900 the cross-sectional life table for the United States showed life expectations of 46 for males and 49 for females. On the basis of their actual experience up through the age of 80, the 1900 birth cohort had an average length of life of 52 years for males and 58 years for females (Faber and Wade 1983).

Generation or cohort life tables, like the one mentioned above, based on the experience of an actual cohort are sometimes constructed. These

indicate the average length of life actually lived after specific ages for a real cohort. The major difficulty faced in building cohort life tables is obtaining population and death data for a cohort from birth until the last survivors have died—over a 100-year period.

A mistaken notion held by many people is that life expectancy at birth is a good indicator of the age at which an older individual will die. This notion has undoubtedly led to some poor planning for old age because a person who has already reached older adulthood on average will die at an age that exceeds life expectancy at birth by a significant amount. As mentioned above, expectation of life in 1996 was 17.5 years for 65-year-olds, 11.1 for 75-year-olds, and 6.1 for 85-year-olds. With this number of years remaining to be lived on average, 65-year-olds should expect to live to 83 on average. Those who live to 75 should expect to live to 86, and those who live to 85 can expect to live to 91 on average. While expectation of life decreases as age increases, the expected age at death increases for those who survive.

CHANGES IN LIFE EXPECTANCY

OVER TIME

As noted above, life expectancy has been increasing over time. This has probably been going on since some time in the last half of the nineteenth century, although reliable data for large sections of the country are not available to track the increase before 1900. In 1900, life expectancy at birth for both sexes was 47.3 years (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1975). This indicates an increase in life expectancy between 1900 and 1996 of 28.8 years. Most of this increase in life expectancy since 1900 is due to declines in mortality among infants and children. These mortality declines were primarily due to the diminishing force of infectious and parasitic diseases which were the most important causes of death among children.

Because life expectancy was low in the past, people often hold the mistaken notion that very few people ever reached old age under high mortality conditions. Yin and Shine (1985) have demonstrated that this mistaken notion was so prevalent that it was commonly incorporated into gerontology textbooks. The fact is that even under conditions of low life expectancy, once childhood

is survived, the chances of living to old age are quite high. This is indicated by the fact that life expectancy at the older years has not increased over time nearly as much as life expectancy at birth. For instance, while life expectancy at birth for white males has increased almost 26 years since 1900, from 48.2 to 73.9 years, life expectancy for white males at age 40 has increased almost 9 years between 1900 and 1996, from 27.7 years to 36.4 years; at age 70, the increase for males has been just over 3 1/2 years, from 9.0 to 12.6 (Anderson 1998).

It should be noted, however, that in the past three decades the pace of improvement in life expectancy at the oldest ages has increased. In 1970 expectation of life for white males at age 70 was 10.5 years, indicating an improvement of 1.5 years in the 70 years between 1900 and 1970. Between 1970 and 1998, the increase was 2 years— significantly greater than the improvement during the first seven decades of the century. This reflects the new era of mortality decline in which decreases in mortality are due to decreased mortality from chronic conditions and are concentrated among the old.

A number of authors have studied the relationships between changes in age-specific mortality and life expectancy. Vaupel (1986) concludes that a reduction in the force of mortality of 1 percent at all ages would not produce as much gain in life expectancy today as it did in 1900. This is because we have already made so much progress in lowering infant and child mortality, the ages that have the greatest effect on life expectancy. Vaupel also shows that as mortality moves to lower levels, more progress is made in increasing life expectancy from mortality declines at older ages rather than at younger ages. At the level of mortality now experienced in the United States, much of the future increase in life expectancy will come from mortality declines occurring at ages over 65. This is true because of the prior success in reducing mortality at earlier ages to such low levels.

CALCULATION OF LIFE EXPECTANCY

WITHIN THE LIFE TABLE

These observations about changes in life expectancy should make clear that life expectancy at birth is heavily weighted by mortality conditions at the

youngest ages. A brief explanation of the life table and how life expectancy is calculated demonstrates why this is the case.

The life table is a statistical model that provides a comprehensive description of the mortality level of a population. Life table measures are particularly valuable because they are succinct indicators of mortality that reflect mortality conditions across the age range, are unaffected by the age structure of the actual population, and thus can be compared across populations. Life table measures can also be used to describe the characteristics of the stationary population that would result from an unchanging schedule of age-specif- ic mortality rates in a closed population with a constant number of births.

There are a number of functions that appear in most life tables and for which conventional notation is widely recognized: qx, lx, dx, Lx, Tx, andx. Each of these measures provides information useful in describing some aspect of the mortality conditions and/or characteristics of the stationary population. The definitions and interpretations of the life table functions follow below. In order to clarify the interpretation of the abridged life table functions, the life table for the U.S. population for 1996 is used as an example (Table 1).

nqx is the probability of dying between exact age x and x + n. As shown in Table 1, the probability of dying in the first year of life

is 0.00732. This is higher than at subsequent ages until age 60 to 65, when the probability of death is 0.06649.

lx is the number of survivors reaching exact age x out of the original life table population. The size of the original life table population, the radix or lo, is usually assumed to be 100,000; however, this is a convention and other values can be used. Mortality conditions in 1996 were such that out of 100,000 births, 99,268 would reach age 1. This column of the life table can be used to compute how many people who reach a given age will survive to a later age. For instance, among the 80,870 people who reach age 65, 33,629 people or 42 percent will reach age 85 with mortality conditions as shown in Table 1.

ndx is the number of deaths in the life table population between exact age x and x + n.

In the sample life table, 732 of the 100,000 births would die between ages 0 and 1 and 7,814 would die between ages 65 and 70.

nLx is the total number of years lived by the life table population between exact age x and x + n. Between birth and age 1, the life table population represented in Table 1 would live 99,370 years. This column also can be interpreted as the number of people in the stationary population at each year of age.

Tx is the total number of years lived after exact age x by the life table population surviving to age x, or the number of people in the stationary population age x and older. The 100,000 entrants to the life table in Table 1 would live a total of 7,611,825

years, and the 80,870 who reach age 65 would live a total of 1,416,873 more years.

x is the expectation of life at exact age x or the average length of life remaining to be lived for the life table population which survives to exact age x. x is computed from the Tx and lx columns of the life table: x = Tx/lx. As indicated earlier, at birth, the life table population in Table 1 has a life expectancy of 76.1 years.

DIFFERENTIALS IN LIFE EXPECTANCY

There are large differentials in life expectancy among demographic and socioeconomic groups in the United States. Males have lower life expectancies than females throughout the age

range. Males’ lower chances for a longer life are thought to result from a combination of biological differences and lifestyle factors. In 1996, 0 was 73.1 for males and 79.1 for females (Anderson 1998). By age 50, the difference is narrowed to 4.3 years, with a life expectancy of 27.2 for men and 31.5 for women. At age 85, men can expect to live another 5.4 years, while women can expect to live 6.4 years.

There is also a significant difference in life expectancy between whites and African Americans in the United States. This is assumed to result primarily from the difference in socioeconomic status and accompanying life circumstances that exist between African Americans and whites in the United States. In 1996, life expectancy at birth was 76.8 for whites and only 70.2 for blacks. At age 65, white life expectancy was 17.6 years; while for blacks of that age, it was 15.8 years. At the oldest ages, a crossover in mortality rates by race has been observed in the past. After the age of crossover, African-American mortality rates are lower than white mortality rates. In 1987 this was true at ages above 83. In the past, this crossover has shown up repeatedly in comparisons of AfricanAmerican and white mortality in the United States and has been attributed to the ‘‘survival of the fittest’’ among the black population (Manton and Stallard 1981). Recently, however, doubt has been raised as to whether the crossover is real or is a statistical artifact resulting from age misstatement by older African Americans in both the census and vital records of deaths (Coale and Kisker 1986; Elo and Preston 1994; Preston et al. 1996). Interestingly, Hispanics appear to have life expectancy values that are higher than non-Hispanic whites (Anderson et al. 1997).

INTERNATIONAL DIFFERENCES

In general, the life expectancy of a country is related to its level of socioeconomic development. Most countries that are classified as ‘‘more developed’’ have higher levels of life expectancy at birth than most of the countries classified as ‘‘developing’’; however, within each of these groups of countries there is quite a bit of variability in life expectancy. While the United States has a high level of life expectancy compared to that of the developing countries of the world, the United States ranks quite low in life expectancy among

developed countries and relative to its income level. A recent United Nations listing of the developed countries by level of life expectancy at birth ranks U.S. males as nineteenth and U.S. females as fourteenth (United Nations 1997). The countries with higher life expectancy for women include Japan and the Scandinavian countries. For men, most European countries including some in southern Europe have higher life expectancies at birth than the United States. The low ranking of the United States is attributed, in part, to the inequities in mortality among subgroups of the population, especially the high level among African Americans, and also to the high level of violent deaths. In recent years Japan has become the world leader in life expectancy at birth with values of 0 of 76.4 for men and 82.9 for women in 1995 (Ministry of Health and Welfare, Japan 1999). These values exceed 1996 U.S. values by 3.3 years for men and 3.8 years for women. The success of the Japanese in raising their levels of life expectancy has been due to large declines in mortality from cerebrovascular disease and maintenance of low levels of heart disease relative to other developed countries (Yanagishita and Guralnik 1988).

RELATED CONCEPTS

There are some other concepts that are related to life expectancy and are sometimes confused with life expectancy. One is ‘‘life span.’’ The life span of a species is the age to which the longest-lived members survive. The life span of humans is thought to be approximately 115 years; however, Madame Jeanne Calment, whose age was well documented, died in 1997 at the age of 122. Current thinking is that while life expectancy has increased dramatically over the last century, the life span of humans has not changed over time; however, this does not mean it will never change. If discoveries are made in the future that enable us to retard the aging process, it may be possible to lengthen the human life span in the future.

‘‘Life endurancy’’ is a related concept that, like life expectancy, is computed from the life table. This is the age at which a specified proportion of the life table entry cohort is still alive. For instance, in 1990 the age at which 0.1, or 10 percent, of the life table population remained alive was 90 years for men and 96 years for women. Life endurancy has been increasing over time and is

expected to continue to change with changes in survival rates. In 1900 the 10 percent survival age was 81 and 82 for men and women, respectively (Faber and Wade 1983).

Finally, ‘‘healthy or active life expectancy’’ is a subset of total life expectancy. Total life expectancy at any age is the sum of two parts: healthy life expectancy and unhealthy life expectancy. While the concept of health life expectancy was introduced in the 1960s (Sanders 1964) and developed in the 1970s (Sullivan 1971a, 1971b), it has only become widely adapted by governments and international organizations in the 1990s.

Interest in healthy life expectancy has grown recently as people have recognized that gains in total life expectancy today may not mean the same thing as in the past. Past gains in life expectancy came about largely because fewer people died of infectious diseases, either because they did not get the diseases or they received treatment that prevented death. People thus saved from death were generally free of the disease. Under these circumstances gains in life expectancy were accompanied by better health in the population surviving. Now, with gains in life expectancy being made because of declining death rates from chronic diseases especially among the old, it is not clear that the surviving population is a healthier population. This is because generally there is no cure for the chronic diseases, and for many their onset has not yet been prevented. People may be saved from death but they live with disease. This is the basis for questioning whether the additions to life expectancy are healthy or unhealthy years.

Crimmins and colleagues (1997) estimated that healthy life expectancy or disability-free life expectancy at birth in the United States in 1990 was 58.8 years for men and 63.9 years for women. The difference between blacks and whites in disa- bility-free life expectancy at birth was even greater than the difference in total life expectancy. In 1990 black disability-free life expectancy for males at age 20 was 37.9 years while that for whites was 45.8 years (Hayward and Heron 1999). Studies that addressed the issue of changes in healthy life expectancy for the 1970 and 1980 period generally found that when healthy life was defined as nondisabled life, active life expectancy had not increased (Wilkins and Adams 1983; Crimmins et al. 1989). More recent studies have found increases in active

life expectancy (Crimmins et al. 1997; Robine and Mormiche 1994).

Healthy life expectancy can be defined in many ways. Examples include average length of life free from a disability that causes a person to alter his or her normal activity; average length of life free of dependency on others for the performance of basic activities necessary to living, such as eating, bathing, and getting in and out of bed; and average length of life without disease (Bebbington 1988; Colvez et al. 1986; Crimmins et al. 1997; Crimmins et al. 1994; Rogers et al. 1989). Some measures of healthy life combine multiple indicators of health using weights; for instance, the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics measure combines selfassessed health and disability in its indicator of healthy life (Erickson et al. 1995).

There are multiple methodological approaches to estimating health expectancy. Most can be described under one of two headings: the Sullivan method or the multistate method (Sullivan 1971a; Schoen 1988). Microsimulation techniques have also been employed recently (Laditka and Wolf 1998).

REFERENCES

Anderson, R.N. 1998 United States Abridged Life Tables, 1996. National Vital Statistics Reports: from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, National Vital Statistics System, 47(13). Hyattsville, Md.: National Center for Health Statistics.

———, K. D. Kochanek, and S. L. Murphy 1997 Report of Final Mortality Statistics, 1995. Monthly Vital Statistics Report, 45(11), suppl. 2. Hyattsville, Md.: National Center for Health Statistics.

Bebbington, A. C. 1988 ‘‘The Expectation of Life without Disability in England and Wales.’’ Social Science and Medicine 27:321–326.

Coale, A. J., and E. E. Kisker 1986 ‘‘Mortality Crossovers: Reality or Bad Data?’’ Population Studies 40:389–401.

Colvez, A., J. M. Robine, D. Bucquet, F. Hatton, B. Morel, and S. Lelaidier 1986 ‘‘L’espérance de Vie Sans Incapacité en France en 1982.’’ (Expectation of Life without Disability in France in 1982.) Population 41:1025–1042.

Crimmins, E. M., M. D. Hayward, and Y. Saito 1994 ‘‘Changing Mortality and Morbidity Rates and the Health Status and Life Expectancy of the Older Population.’’ Demography 31:159–175.

Crimmins, E. M., Y. Saito, and D. Ingegneri 1989 ‘‘Changes in Life Expectancy and Disability-Free Life

Expectancy in the United States.’’ Population and

Development Review 15:235–267.

——— 1997 ‘‘Trends in Disability-Free Life Expectancy in the United States, 1970–1990.’’ Population and Development Review 23:555–572.

Elo, I. T., and S. H. Preston 1994 ‘‘Estimating AfricanAmerican Mortality from Inaccurate Data.’’ Demography 31:427–458.

Erickson, P., R. Wilson, and I. Shannon 1995 ‘‘Years of Healthy Life.’’ Healthy People 2000: Statistical Notes 7:1–15.

Faber, J., and A. Wade 1983 Life Tables for the United States: 1900–2050. Actuarial Study No. 89. Washington: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Social Security Administration, Office of the Actuary.

Hayward, M. D., and M. Heron 1999 ‘‘Racial Inequality in Active Life among Adult Americans.’’ Demography 36:77–91.

Laditka, S. B., and D. A. Wolf 1998 ‘‘New Methods for Modeling and Calculation Active Life Expectancy.’’

Journal of Aging and Health 10:214–241.

United Nations 1997 ‘‘Life Expectancy and Infant Mortality Rate, 1995–2000: Developed Regions.’’ http:// www.un.org/Depts/unsd/gender/3-1dev.htm.

U.S. Bureau of the Census 1975 Historical Statistics of the U.S., Colonial Times to 1970. Bicentennial Edition. Part 2. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Vaupel, J. 1986 ‘‘How Change in Age-Specific Mortality Affects Life Expectancy.’’ Population Studies 40:147–157.

Wilkins, R., and O. B. Adams 1983 ‘‘Health Expectancy in Canada, Late 1970s: Demographic, Regional, and Social Dimensions.’’ American Journal of Public Health

73:1073–1080.

Yanagishita, M., and J. Guralnik 1988 ‘‘Changing Mortality Patterns that Led Life Expectancy in Japan to Surpass Sweden’s: 1972–1982.’’ Demography 25:611–624.

Yin, P., and M. Shine 1985 ‘‘Misinterpretations of Increases in Life Expectancy in Gerontology Textbooks.’’ Gerontologist 25:78–82.

EILEEN M. CRIMMINS

Manton, K. G., and E. Stallard 1981 ‘‘Methods for Evaluating the Heterogeneity of Aging Processes in Human Populations Using Vital Statistics Data: Explaining the Black/White Mortality Crossover by a Model of Mortality Selection.’’ Human Biology 53:47–67.

Ministry of Health and Welfare, Japan 1999 ‘‘Abridged Life Tables for Japan, 1995.’’ http://www.mhw.go.jp/ english/database/lifetbl/part6.html.

Preston, S. H., I. T. Elo, I. Rosenwaike, and M. Hill 1996 ‘‘African-American Mortality at Older Ages: Results of a Matching Study.’’ Demography 33:193–209.

Robine, J. M., and P. Mormiche 1994 ‘‘Estimation de la Valeur de l’Espérance de Vie Sans Incapacité en France en 1991.’’ (Estimation of Expectation of Life without Disability in France in 1991.) Les Français et Leur Santé 1:17–36.

Rogers, R., A. Rogers, and A. Belanger 1989 ‘‘Active Life among the Elderly in the United States: Multistate Life Table Estimates and Population Projections.’’

Milbank Quarterly 67:370–411.

Sanders, B. 1964 ‘‘Measuring Community Health Level.’’ American Journal of Public Health 54:1063–1070.

Schoen, R. 1988 Modeling Multigroup Population New

York: Plenum.

Sullivan, D. F. 1971a ‘‘A Single Index of Mortality and Morbidity.’’ HSMHA Health Reports 86:347–354.

——— 1971b Disability Components for an Index of Health. Vital and Health Statistics 2 (42). Rockville, Md.: National Center for Health Statistics.

LIFE HISTORIES AND

NARRATIVES

The life history approach to social research and theory subsumes several methodological techniques and types of data. These include case studies, interviews, use of documents (letters, diaries, archival records), oral histories, and various kinds of narratives. The popularity of this approach has waxed and waned since the early 1900s. It was used extensively in the 1920s and 1930s and was identified with the Chicago sociology of W. I. Thomas, Robert Park, Clifford Shaw, and others. The succeeding generation of sociology witnessed the solidification of quantitative measurement techniques coupled with survey data collection, and the increased use of those approaches paralleled a relative decline in life history research. In the 1970s, however, there began a resurgence of interest in life history research not only in the United States but in Europe. The work of some sociologists, such as Howard S. Becker and Anselm Strauss, has maintained the early Chicago tradition, while newer generations of scholars—such as Norman Denzin and Michal McCall (United States), Ken Plummer (England), Daniel Bertaux (France), and Fritz Schütze (Germany)—have augmented life history research. This resurgence has been accompanied by the creation of Research Committee 38 (Biography and Society) of the International Sociological

Association in the late 1970s and has included a broadened interdisciplinary base through the incorporation of narrative theory and methods from other disciplines. In this broadened use there has been a transition from using the approach as purely a methodological device to using it as method, theory, and substance. It is this transition that frames this article.

The main assumptions of this approach are that the actions of individuals and groups are simultaneously emergent and structured and that individual and group perspectives must be included in the data used for analysis. Accordingly, any materials that reveal those perspectives can and should be regarded as essential to the empirical study of human social life. Life history materials, as described above (see Denzin 1989b, chap. 8; Plummer 1983, chap. 2; Gottschalk et al. 1945), contain first-, second-, and third-order accounts of past actions, as well as plans and expectations regarding future actions. Those materials will reveal significant information concerning the author’s (writer and speaker) meanings. Invariably, these materials pertain also to the processual character of social life, and thus there is a major emphasis on temporal properties such as sequence, duration, and tempo. These assumptions and emphases have been characteristic of the vast majority of life history studies.

The first major empirical study in American sociology that systematically combined explicit theory and method was Thomas and Znaniecki’s The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918–1920). The purpose of these researchers was to investigate Polish immigrants in America, especially their problems in adjusting to American urban life. The researchers used their famous attitude-value scheme as an explanatory framework. In this scheme, attitudes referred to individual subjective meanings and values to objective societal conditions. Thomas and Znaniecki proposed a set of causal explanations based on how the relations of attitudes and values were interpreted by individuals and groups. In their five-volume, 2,200-page work, they presented almost 800 pages of life history data in support of their conclusions and generalizations. The data included newspaper articles, letters to family members, records from courts and social work agencies, and a 300-page biography of one person that was presented as a representative case (Blumer 1939).

This research, which the Social Science Research Council in 1938 voted as the most outstanding in sociology to that date, depended solely on life history data. Because of its systematic incorporation of theory and method, it stimulated and became an exemplar for a long series of similar studies. These included research on race relations, delinquency, housing, mass media, migration, occupations, and other issues centered primarily in the areas of ethnic and urban studies (Bulmer 1984). The emphasis during this period was on the contributions of life history methods to sociology as an empirical and scientific discipline. Accordingly, researchers using this approach focused on methodological problems such as reliability, validity, hypothesis formation, and the making of generalizations, although comparatively less concern was given to sampling (Gottschalk et al. 1945). Reflecting the major issue of pre–World War II sociological work, the focus was on the adequacy of this approach for discovering lawlike behavior or empirically valid generalizations. The emphasis, in short, was on the approach as a research tool.

The developments in this approach since the early 1970s, perhaps stimulated in part by increased interest in historical sociology and in part by the articulation of insoluble problems in statistical approaches, have been more interdisciplinary, international, and sophisticated than the early works (McCall and Wittner 1990; Jones 1983; Roth 1987). It is increasingly recognized that all social science data, whether represented in discursive or numeric form, are interpretations (Denzin 1989a; Gephart 1988). This recognition is one of the central tenets of the narrative approach to social research (Fisher 1987; Reed 1989; Richardson 1990; Maines 1993), which makes the ontological claim that human beings are inherently storytellers. This shift in emphasis concerning the subject matter of sociology, in which human behavior is conceptualized as significantly communicative and narrative in nature, is precisely what has reframed the utility and potential of the life history approach.

Current uses of life history research display considerable variation as well as more precise conceptual distinctions. Terms such as life story, biography, discourse, history, oral history, personal experience narratives, collective narratives, and sagas are now distinguished from one another (Denzin 1989b, pp. 184–187), and frameworks for linking types of verbal accounts to types of generalizations

have been developed (Sperber 1985, pp. 9–34). Moreover, these developments have occurred within and across different theoretical approaches and disciplines.

It is now common to regard life histories as a legitimate form of data in which currency is established through the propositions contained in narrative theory. Some of the uses found in contemporary work include the following. Schütze (1983) has developed what he calls the narrative interview. This approach focuses on establishing event sequences across the life course on the basis of interview data. These sequences are derived from detailed analyses of biographical materials, with special attention to the structural factors that have shaped the person’s life. Analytical summaries are developed and, through analytical inductive procedures, are compared to subsequently developed summaries. The goal is to produce theoretical interpretations centering on various analytical interests such as life course transitions, career models, or natural histories. Riemann and Schütze (1991) provide a substantive application of this method in the area of chronic illness.

Bertaux (1981; Bertaux and Kohli 1984) has long been an advocate of life history research and was the primary organizer of the Biography and Society Section of the International Sociological Association. He has conducted a number of projects that have goals similar to those of Schütze. His collaborative research on social movements (1990), for example, used life history data from members of students movements in the United States, England, Ireland, Italy, West Germany, and France. There he shows the application of the method in large-scale comparative research projects. The epistemological approach was not to gather data on lived, biographical experiences of the activists but to analyze those data in collective, generic terms. That is, his strategy was to focus on similarities rather than differences across nations and to ground empirically theoretical statements about, for example, processes of commitment to social-movement ideologies. The contention of this research is that biographical and life history data from ordinary people will reveal those similarities and thus make contributions to cross-na- tional research.

Dolby-Stahl (1989), a folklorist, has developed a variation of the life history approach. She calls it

literary folkloristics, and it focuses on personal narrative data. She uses reader response theory to develop an interpretive method for studying the interdependence of personal narratives (stories) and collective narratives (e.g., ethnic group folklore). Her procedures entail locating the respondent (storyteller) in large collectivities (e.g., single parents), identifying salient themes (e.g., day care), and connecting personal to collective narratives (e.g., the respondent’s accounts of day care and media or community accounts). The assumption of this approach is that personal and collective narratives are inherently connected, and thus a personal story is always in some way a collective story. Further, the assumption that the researcher in varying ways is part of the collective story requires facing the interpretive nature of data collection. In this respect, the researcher draws on her own shared cultural experiences to analyze the life history or narrative data provided by the respondent. These procedures locate the life history approach squarely in interpretive social theory, in which credible interpretation is the goal as opposed to, say, producing explanations justified by measures of reliability and validity.

Similarly, Denzin (1989a) has developed an interpretive approach that draws conceptually from postmodernism and phenomenology, and methodologically from Clifford Geertz’s advocacy of thick description. He calls his method interpretive biography, and it is designed to study the turning points of problematic situations in which people find themselves during transition periods. Data include documents, obituaries, life histories, and personal experience stories, with the emphasis on how such information is read and used. The basic question he asks concerns how people live and give meaning to their lives, and how meaning is represented in written, narrative, and oral forms. His approach thus addresses an enduring problem in sociology, which C. Wright Mills located at the intersection of biography and history, as well as the newer problem articulated by interpretive theories regarding the interpretations of texts, cultural forms, and personal acts.

Most of the developments in the 1990s continue to be flamed largely under the rubric of narrative inquiry, signified by the 1991 inception of the

Journal of Narrative and Life History. These recent lines of work can be organized loosely into four categories. First, there have been a considerable

increase in substantive studies. Ezzy (1998) joins a rather large number of scholars (e.g., Angrosino 1995) studying narrative identity, which Orbuch (1997) moves more generically into the arena of accounts. Gubrium (1993) uses narrative data in his examination of quality of life among nursing home residents. Plummer (1995) uses similar data to study sexuality. Maines and Bridger (1992) studied the narrative character of land-use decisions. Randall (1999) has studied the narrative aspects of intelligence. Eheart and Power (1995) assess processes of success and failure in families with adopted children. Maines (1999) has provided data about how racial attitudes about justice are embedded in larger narrative structures. TenHouten (1999) has used life history interviews in a comparative analysis of temporality among Austrialian aborignies and Europeans.

These substantive topics overlap with the second line of work pertaining to historical sociology. Barry Schwartz (1996, 1997) has rekindled sociological interest in collective memory to show how historical processes contribute to changing cultural representations (see also Wertsch and O’Conner 1994). Another strand of work has pertained to causal analysis. Abbott (1992) articulated his version as narrative positivism which focuses on the properties of events and sequence to move quantitative sociology from the study of variables to the study of actual events. Griffin (1993) uses data on lynchings to propose a similar approach, utilizing computer-assisted event structure analysis that focuses directly on temporality. Gotham and Staples (1996) follow these studies with a theoretical analysis of narrative in the relations of agency and social structure, as does Berger (1995) in his analysis of Jewish Holocaust survivors. Mahoney (1999) addresses nominal, ordinal, and narrative dimensions of causal analysis, noting that ‘‘narrative analysis has the obvious strength of allowing the analyst to show sensitivity to detail, process, conjuncture, and causal complexity’’ (p. 1168).

The third area concerns methods of data collection and analysis. Holstein and Gubrium (1995) treat the interview as a social encounter that itself constructs the data gathered. In these encounters, respondents are regarded as narrators who tell the story of their ‘‘own past attitudes, feelings, and behaviors’’ (p. 32). McMahan and Rogers (1994) likewise present oral history interviewing as an interactive, negotiated process. They synthesize a

large amount of materials about potential biases, and make concrete suggestions for developing skills to deal with them. On the other hand, Lieblich and associates (1998) present a model for analyzing life story data. Their model is composed of two continua: holistic versus categorical (whether a life story is taken as a whole or dissected into parts or categories) and content versus form (analysis of the substance or structure of life story accounts). This model is suggested as useful for guiding analyses for varying purposes. Mishler (1995) also addresses the diversity of narrative inquiry, and proposes a typology of narrative analyses. These include modes of analysis that focus on (1) the correspondence between temporal sequences of actual events and their textual representation, (2) how types of stories acquire structure and coherence, and (3) the content and function of stories. This typology organizes a large literature on narrative, and serves as a heuristic for discerning similarities and differences in analytical approaches and purposes. Finally, Atkinson (1998) describes procedures for the life story interview, whose ‘‘product is entirely a first-person narrative, with the researcher removed as much as possible from thetext’’ (p. 2). These procedures would encourage respondents to see and tell their lives as a whole, and Atkinson has developed a growing archival data base of over 300 documents suitable for various analytical purposes.

The life story interview merges with the fourth line of work, which focuses on biographies and authbiographies. Smith (1994) provides an excellent overview of biographical methods. He begins with Charles Darwin’s biography and brings the reader to contemporary issues that cut across various disciplines in the human sciences. In doing so, he emphasizes that biographical analysis remains an unfinished project that is filled with both conflict and creativity. Inside that space of conflict and creativity rests the new genre of auto-ethnography, or literally the study of oneself. Bochner and Ellis (1992) provide one of the more interesting instances of this approach. Each author was involved in the same first-time event. Wanting to fully explore the meaning of that event, they first wrote extensive personal accounts of it. Second, they shared those accounts with one another and with friends; and third, they wrote a joint account from the standpoint of their relationship. Through these procedures, they were able to preserve their own