Читать книгу Lifespan Development - Tara L. Kuther - Страница 49

Context refers to where and when a person develops. Context encompasses many aspects of the physical and social environment, such as family, neighborhood, country, and historical time period. It includes intangible factors, characteristics that are not visible to the naked eye, such as values, customs, ideals, and culture. (For more on the nature of cultural influences, see the accompanying feature Cultural Influences on Development: Defining Culture.) In order to understand a given individual’s development, we must look to his or her context. For example, consider the context in which you were raised. Where did you grow up? City? Suburb? Rural area? What was your neighborhood like? Were you encouraged to be assertive and actively question the adults around you, or were you expected to be quiet and avoid confrontation? How large a part was religion in your family’s life? How did religious values shape your parent’s childrearing practices and your own values? How did your family’s economic status affect your development? The multitude of contextual factors that interact over the life course can be organized into three categories: age-graded influences, history-graded influences, and nonnormative influences (Elder & George, 2016; Elder, Shanahan, & Jennings, 2016).

Age-graded influences are closely tied to chronological age and are largely predictable. Most individuals walk at about a year of age and reach puberty in early adolescence. Similarly, most women reach menopause in the late 40s or early 50s. Age-graded influences tend to be most influential early and late in life. Although these influences are often tied to biology, social milestones can also form age-graded influences. Most people in the United States enter school at about 5 years of age, graduate high school and enter college at about age 18, and retire during their 60s. Some age-graded influences are context dependent. For example, adolescents in suburban and rural contexts commonly get driver’s licenses at age 16, but this may not be true of adolescents in urban settings where driving may be less common.

History-graded influences refer to how the time period in which we live and the unique historical circumstances of that time period affect our development. Examples of history-graded influences include wars, epidemics, advances in science and technology, and economic shifts such as periods of depression or prosperity (Baltes, 1987). Contextual influences tied to particular historical eras explain why a generation of people born at the same time, called a cohort, is similar in ways that people born at other times are different. For example, adults who came of age during the Great Depression and World War II are similar in some ways that make them different from later cohorts; they tend to have particularly strong views on the importance of the family, civic mindedness, and social connection (Rogler, 2002).