Demographic life transitions: and alternative theoretical paradigm

Abstract

Event history analyses, while useful, have limited explanatory power in relation to demographic life transitions. This is because demographic behaviour has a future orientation. People marry, cohabit, have children, divorce or migrate primarily because they have expectations or hopes about how these transitions will affect their lives. Individuals weigh up alternatives about their future within their personal and cultural context. The paper proposes and develops a holistic appraoch to the investigation of demographic life transitions which revolves around three dimensions: the self, the intimate and the social. Event histories were spawned by the life history approach. The paper argues that we need to get back to examining the histories of lives, that is, how events fit into lives, rather than abstracting events from lives