Mutual attraction: demography and life-course analysis.

Bringing together a life course and demographic perspective provides a useful framework for studying aging. This perspective conceptualizes aging as the dynamic process of cohorts moving through the life course in historical time. Each cohort is embedded in a social structure that regulates how it ages, and the social structure changes as the cohort advances through the life course over time. This view of aging provides a strategy for developing research on such basic questions as: Why is the life course structured the way it is? How, and why, does the experience of aging differ between cohorts? And how, and why, is aging experienced differentially by various segments of a cohort?