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support their children for unprecedentedly long periods of time. Most of them have not had life-long jobs, and robust pension plans or retirement savings accounts are fewer and fewer. Government subsidies help, but are hard to live on. What this means is that not only are seniors able to live active lives, many of them have to live active lives — they need the income. Being able to be up and at ‘em and on the job every morning when you’re 70 is great, but being forced to is not.

Social scientists project that over the next few decades, the number of people age 65 and over will grow at three times the rate of the population generally — so seniors are going to become a bigger and even more important part of society.

Running the Course of Life

From a sociological perspective, understanding the life course doesn’t just mean understanding what happens over the course of a life; it means understanding when it happens. In this section, I explain how sociologists,

demographers, and other social scientists study the incidence and timing of life-course transitions.

Demographics and life transitions

Demographics is the study of population patterns — in other words, the study of how populations of different groups of people grow, shrink, and move over time.

If you’re interested in TV, you may have heard the term used in connection with ratings. TV producers pay close attention to the demographics of their audience because they need to report that information to their advertisers. Here are the kind of information advertisers want to know:

How many people watch a program?

Where do they live?

How old are they?

Are they men or women?

Are they married or unmarried?

How much money do they make?

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This is important information for advertisers because they want to target their products: If you manufacture pantyhose, you probably don’t want to advertise on a program watched mostly by men — unless they’re drag queens or bank robbers.

Demographic information is also essential, however, for many other organizations. Governments need to know how many representatives to assign to a state (the primary purpose for the U.S. census), as well as where to put libraries and mailboxes and swing sets. Corporations need to know where to open new electronics stores, bakeries, and day care centers; and nonprofit organizations need to know where to focus their efforts to support single mothers, or elderly Lutherans, or people with HIV. Demographic data are also, of course, very important to sociologists as well as other social scientists.

Demographers, and sociologists interested in demography, tend to be particularly interested in life-course transitions. Those are the points at which people transition from one stage of life to the next. Some transitions (aging, for example) are gradual, but most are quite abrupt: Even if they’re a long time coming, they happen more or less instantly. Important life-course transitions include:

Birth

Completing stages of education (grade school, high school, college, grad school)

The beginning of labor-force participation (in other words, getting a job)

The start of dating and sexual activity

Moving out of one’s parents’ household

Childbearing

Cohabitation (moving in with a romantic partner)

Marriage

Divorce

Death

Gathering data on these can be tricky; some are matters of public record, but others need to be gathered with surveys or other techniques (see sidebar, “Counting and recounting”). These are the essential signposts of life, though, and with these transitions come enormous changes in people’s activities and goals. Having accurate demographic data is invaluable for understanding how communities work — and how they change over time.

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Counting and recounting

When you hear someone tell you that “the population of Boise is 205,314,” or “the average Canadian male has first sexual intercourse at age 16,” or “700 million people watched the Oscars,” do you ever wonder how the heck they know that? You should. Demographic data are gathered by a variety of means, none of them perfect.

It may seem easy to call someone up and ask how old he or she is, but in actuality surveys are hugely expensive — and the better they are, the more expensive they get. The U.S. census aspires to survey every single American resident, but it’s impossible to reach that goal. The Census Bureau itself estimates that it missed over six million people in the 2000 census . . .

and that’s just for the bare headcount. More detailed demographic information comes from the census’s long form, which was intentionally only sent to about 16 percent of households. That doesn’t mean the long form data are inaccurate, but it does mean that there’s greater room for error there — and there’s even more

room for error in smaller, privately administered surveys.

Among surveys commonly used by sociologists, the number of respondents range from tens of thousands at the high end — larger sample sizes are highly unusual, especially when data are detailed — to mere hundreds at the low end. Many sociological studies derive from just a few big surveys where data are publicly available; few sociologists have the resources to survey thousands of respondents.

As I explain in Chapter 4, having a relatively small sample size doesn’t mean that data are inaccurate, just so long as the group you managed to survey is actually representative of the population you want to study. That’s easier said than done (and as you can see by the last sentence, it’s not even that easily said). Statisticians have developed some extremely impressive tools for analyzing data, but when someone throws a bunch of demographic data at you to prove his or her point, it’s not a bad idea to read the fine print.

Different shapes of the circle of life

The average American man graduates from high school at 18, moves out of his parents’ house at age 22, gets married at age 27, and has his first child at age 32. Does that describe any actual American man you know? It might, but it probably doesn’t. Those are averages calculated from data on many thousands of men, but each individual American man follows his own course.

So do those averages mean anything at all? Absolutely. They describe the normative life course in American society. They describe the typical path of life for American men, and they’re roughly equal to the averages seen in similar countries. Americans know about what those averages are, and men know that if they go through those transitions earlier or later than average — or not at all — they’re unusual.

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Of course, “American men” is a vast group, comprising well over 100 million people. It includes white working-class men in Philadelphia, Latino architects in Miami, black dentists in Oregon, and Asian farmers in California. Each of those groups has its own averages, and for various reasons they’re all different. Demographers, and sociologists interested in demography, spend a lot of time trying to figure out how life course transitions are different among different groups of people, as well as why they’re different and when they happen for each group. This may include asking questions like:

Why do people whose parents are college graduates become financially independent at a later age than people whose parents are not?

Why do women typically marry at a younger age than men?

Why do divorce rates vary among races and ethnicities?

Why do people in some states retire at earlier ages than people in other states?

Why are small towns typically populated by older people than are big cities?

Just starting to think about what the answers to these questions might be, you can see how life course transitions are deeply tied to all other aspects of society. The average age of, say, marriage is tied to a range of things including education, dating and courtship practices, the economy, and the law. If it varies — as it does — from group to group, that’s typically for a range of good reasons, and it falls to sociologists and other social scientists to sort those reasons out.

Because the sequence and timing of life transitions varies among social groups, that means it varies from place to place, from society to society, and from time to time. Another task that keeps sociologists and demographers busy is figuring out why those transitions vary over time. As I note in the introduction to this chapter, people today marry several years later than they did in the fairly recent past . . . why? Since 1883, the shape of life has changed . . . and it will continue to change.

The very nature of life course transitions changes over time. Transitions that may seem momentous and universal at one time and in one place may disappear as important life markers, and others may arise.

Retirement, for example, was not too long ago regarded as a hugely significant life transition. When a man or woman had finished a successful career, they stopped working and commenced to spend the rest of their life on pursuits they chose, living off retirement savings or a pension. Today, that life transition is disappearing. More and more people are working throughout their lives, and changing companies or even changing careers as they do so.