Families in the Life Course: Interdependency of Roles, Role Configurations, and Pathways

Familles are central in the unfolding life course. They have both internal and external dynamics that reflect and characterize the modern life span, and a life course perspective has particular utility for understanding the role and implications of families for individuals and society. The purpose of this paper is 3-fold. First, we offer a family life course perspective that delineates core concepts of roles, role configurations, and pathways, specifies the links between them, and highlights the importance of linked lives and structural context. Second, we elaborate a latent class approach for modeling the multilayered dynamic interdependencies that characterize modern family life. Third, we provide an empirical example by considering the timing of childbearing, teen parenthood, and its place in the transition to adulthood using women's data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (N = 2,191). We conclude by discussing further avenues of family research that are enhanced with a life course approach and complementary latent structure methodology. Key Words: family, latent class, life course, pathways, roles, teen parenthood. Families are central in the unfolding life course. Transitions into and out of families characterize movement across the life span. These may include adoption of family roles in the transition to adulthood, marital disruption and reformation during the period of midlife, the second "singlehood" brought upon by the death of a spouse, and a role reversal resulting from potential dependency, financial and otherwise, on one's children in the late adult years. Stages of the life course are also defined by familial status, including childhood defined by dependency and adulthood defined by role transitions and status markers such as parenthood. Family dynamics, both internal and external, reflect and characterize the modern life course. A life course perspective has particular utility for understanding the role and implications of families in society and development over the life span. The purpose of this paper is threefold. First, we elaborate a life course perspective that delineates core concepts of roles, role configurations, and pathways, as well as specifies the links between them. These links include the interrelation of family and other social roles, the significance of "linked lives," and the interrelations of families, life courses, and social stratification. Second, we elaborate a latent class approach that models the multilayered dynamic interdependencies of modern family life. Third, we apply this approach to a key area of family research: the timing of childbearing and teen parenthood and their implications for the transition to adulthood. We conclude by discussing further avenues of family research that would be enhanced with a life course-latent structure approach. FAMILIES IN A LIFE COURSE CONTEXT: INTERDEPENDENCY OF ROLES, ROLE CONFIGURATIONS, AND PATHWAYS Life course research is premised on the notion that human development involves the order and timing of social roles over the life course. Conceptually, there are three key components to the life course perspective: roles, role configurations, and pathways. Table 1 describes these as well as other key concepts. Roles refer to the positions that individuals occupy within social institutions, notably school, paid work, and family. Individuals are embedded in or tied to discrete social roles that have routine behaviors associated with them, expectations for behaviors, and socially defined resources (Parsons & Shils, 1951; Stryker, 1980). In family scholarship, social roles inform both classic and contemporary work (Blood & Wolfe, 1960; Johnson & Wu, 2002; Steffensmeier, 1982; Stryker, 1968). In general, roles are basic descriptors of social life; they provide a foundation for theory both within and beyond families. A life course perspective necessitates consideration of multiple social roles in context and recognition that the meaning of any given role is dependent upon the presence or absence of other roles. …