Elder G H
Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 27516-3997, USA.
Child Dev. 1998 Feb;69(1):1-12.
The pioneering longitudinal studies of child development (all launched in the 1920s and 1930s) were extended well beyond childhood. Indeed, they eventually followed their young study members up to the middle years and later life. In doing so, they generated issues that could not be addressed satisfactorily by available theories. These include the recognition that individual lives are influenced by their ever-changing historical context, that the study of human lives calls for new ways of thinking about their pattern and dynamic, and that concepts of human development should apply to processes across the life span. Life course theory has evolved since the 1960s through programmatic efforts to address such issues.
儿童发展领域的开创性纵向研究（均始于20世纪20年代和30年代）的研究范围远远超出了童年时期。事实上，这些研究最终对其年轻的研究对象进行了长达中年及晚年的跟踪。在此过程中，它们引发了一些现有理论无法圆满解决的问题。这些问题包括认识到个人生活受到不断变化的历史背景的影响，对人类生活的研究需要新的方式来思考其模式和动态，以及人类发展的概念应适用于整个生命周期的过程。自20世纪60年代以来，生命历程理论通过一系列有计划的努力不断发展，以解决此类问题。
