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Does the Body Forget? Adult Health, Life Course Dynamics, and Social Change

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Handbook of the Life Course

Part of the book series: Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research ((HSSR))

Abstract

Despite the growing application of a life course framework to understand the origins of adult health, research in this area faces important challenges that warrant consideration. Three challenges are considered here. First, how should life course researchers conceptually define health? We discuss the usefulness of a population health perspective where life course exposures give rise to a “portfolio” of health outcomes. Second, we argue that life course frameworks would be enriched by being more biologically informed and illustrate how life course exposures influence health through developmental and aging processes. Finally, we argue that life course research on adult health must attend more explicitly to the historical context to better understand the dynamics of life course influences on adult health. Dramatic changes have occurred across current birth cohorts represented in the adult population in their prenatal, childhood and adult exposures, yet these changes are rarely central in life course studies of health.

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Acknowledgment

This work was partially supported by grants, R01 HD05396 (PI, Robert A. Hummer), 5 R24 HD042849 (PI, Mark D. Hayward) and 5 T32 HD007081 (PI, Jennifer Glass) awarded to the Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute on Child Health and Human Development.

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  1. Population Research Center and Department of Sociology, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

    Mark D. Hayward & Connor M. Sheehan

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  1. Mark D. Hayward
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  2. Connor M. Sheehan
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Correspondence to Mark D. Hayward .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA

    Michael J. Shanahan

  2. Life Course Center and Department of Sociology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA

    Jeylan T. Mortimer

  3. Department of Sociology, Washington State University, Pullman, Washington, USA

    Monica Kirkpatrick Johnson

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Hayward, M.D., Sheehan, C.M. (2016). Does the Body Forget? Adult Health, Life Course Dynamics, and Social Change. In: Shanahan, M., Mortimer, J., Kirkpatrick Johnson, M. (eds) Handbook of the Life Course. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20880-0_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20880-0_16

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

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