Introduction
Life course theory (LCT) looks at how chronological age, relationships, common life transitions, life events, social change, and human agency shape people’s lives from birth to death. It locates individual and family development in cultural and historical contexts. LCT has been used to understand how adolescence is connected to earlier development and life events as well as to understand how circumstances in adolescence are connected to later health and well-being (Johnson et al. 2011). It has become a major theoretical framework in criminology and the leading perspective driving longitudinal study of health behaviors and outcomes.
LCT has been emerging over more than 50 years, across several disciplines, including anthropology, demography, psychology, social history, and sociology. Glen Elder Jr., a sociologist, was one of the early authors of LCT, and his work is still foundational to the ongoing development of the perspective. In the early 1960s, as he examined several...
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Hutchison, E.D. (2017). Life Course Theory. In: Levesque, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Adolescence. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32132-5_13-2
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