Redfoot D L, Back K W
Federal Affairs Department, American Association of Retired Persons, Washington, D.C.
Int J Aging Hum Dev. 1988;27(3):155-70. doi: 10.2190/8UFW-R1NH-F2V1-6R0M.
Despite the recent popularity of the term, the degree to which the "life course" as such is experienced in everyday life is not clear. Explorations of this question have not been very satisfying because they tend to either eliminate biographical time (as in survey research) or assume its presence (as with clinical, biographical, and life historical research) through the methods used. Our exploratory research used the meanings of personal possessions as an indirect measure of the temporal framing of experiences among forty women who had moved into facilities for elderly persons. We found considerable variation in the relative frequency and importance of biographical references in descriptions of those possessions, which challenges the concepts that have been used to relate experiences of temporality to the self and the methods that have been used to explore these experiences.
尽管这个术语最近很流行，但在日常生活中体验到的“生命历程”的程度尚不清楚。对这个问题的探索并不十分令人满意，因为通过所使用的方法，它们往往要么消除传记时间（如在调查研究中），要么假定其存在（如临床、传记和生命史研究）。我们的探索性研究将个人物品的意义作为一种间接手段，来衡量四十位入住养老院的女性的经历的时间框架。我们发现，在对这些物品的描述中，传记参考的相对频率和重要性存在相当大的差异，这对那些将时间性体验与自我联系起来的概念以及用来探索这些体验的方法提出了挑战。
