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 tha t regulates how it ages, and the social structure changes as the cohor t advances through the life course over time. This view of aging provi des 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 e xperience of aging differ between cohorts? And how, and why, is aging experienced differentially by various segments of a cohort?