COHORT PERSPECTIVES1890 1910 1930 1950 1970 1990 2010 2030 205020406080100AgeTime (History)Schematic View of Cohort PerspectivesABCFigure 1
SOURCE: Riley, Foner, and Waring, 1998, p. 245 (adapted).
Merton 1972; here ‘‘aging’’ refers to duration in
the particular system.)
AGING PERSPECTIVESResearch on the processes of aging within and
across cohorts illuminates the interrelated aspects
of people’s lives and the particular characteristics
and historical backgrounds of the cohorts to which
they belong.
Intracohort Perspectives. Many empirical stud-
ies and much conceptual work uses the ‘‘life-course
approach’’ to trace over time the lives of members
of a single cohort (e.g., Clausen 1986). As one
familiar example, studies of ‘‘status attainment’’
investigate lifelong trajectories of achievement be-
haviors, using longitudinal and causal modeling to
examine the interconnections among such vari-
ables as family background, scholastic achieve-
ment, succession of jobs, and employment and
unemployment (cf. Featherman 1981). The intra-
cohort perspective is used in many forms—micro-
and macro-level, objective and subjective—in a
range of studies on how people as they develop
and grow older move through diverse paths in the
changing society (Dannefer 1987), how sequences
of role transitions are experienced, and how aging
people relate to the changing environment. Psy-
chologists as well as sociologists study interindividual
changes in performance over the life course (e.g.,
Schaie 1996), while Nesselroade (1991) looks at
intra-individual fluctuations over shorter peri-
ods of time.Longitudinal studies of aging in a single co-
hort can contribute importantly to causal analysis
by establishing the time order of correlated as-
pects of people’s lives and environmental events.
However, this perspective is vulnerable to possible
misinterpretation through the fallacy of ‘‘cohort-
centrism,’’ that is, erroneously assuming that mem-
bers of all cohorts will age in exactly the same
fashion as members of the cohort under study
(Riley 1978). Yet in fact, members of different
cohorts, as they respond to different periods of