Which of the following correctly describe life span in the study of human development?

3.1 Age

With respect to life-span development, it seems clear that the differences within any age stratum are exceeded by the differences between strata. Thus, while one might describe mean differences between any two age groups on tests of cognitive function, these differences are modest when considered in the context of their respective group standard deviations (Schaie 1982). Further, it is clear that job-relevant experience more than offsets any modest decline that might occur in job-related abilities (Schmidt et al. 1992). The same tradeoff between ability and experience is true, but to a somewhat lesser extent, with respect to the decline of physical abilities with age (Landy et al. 1992). For a wide range of jobs from managerial to unskilled labor positions, the age of the applicant should be largely irrelevant.

Recent meta-analyses have demonstrated that there are no differences in either the objective performance or the judged performance of older workers (Arvey and Murphy 1998, McEvoy and Casio 1989, Waldman and Avolio 1986). It does appear that older workers experience greater satisfaction and less absenteeism, but this may be more a function of increasing experience, skill development, and organizational position than age per se (Bedeian et al. 1992). When experience and job title are held constant, there seem, to be few differences in satisfaction between younger and older workers (Mangione and Quinn 1975). This confound is exaggerated by full-time/part- time status since part-time jobs tend to be more mundane and are most often held by younger workers. Once again, when part-time vs. full-time status is held constant, there are no differences in satisfaction between older and younger workers (Hollinger 1991).

1 Introduction

From an educational perspective lifespan development can be described as a continuous and active process of coping with developmental tasks, i.e., demands, challenges, and chances that depend on people's environment and life situation in given phases of the aging process. Specific developmental tasks are conceptualized as a consequence of the interaction between biological maturity, normative conceptions of ‘successful’ aging or development in society and individual plans, aims, needs, and values. The significance of environment and life situation for lifespan development is twofold: first, coping successfully with demands of the environment and life situation increases the potential for coping with future demands and initiates further development; second, chances offered by environment and life situation contribute to the realization of specific developmental gains.

The here intended understanding of development as a process of personal growth (focusing on stable, not only temporary gains) is connected closely to a concept of education that implies two meanings: the process of being engaged in educational activities (person educating himself) and the result of this engagement (the educated person). Education does not only lead to the establishment of differentiated knowledge systems, but also facilitates a broader understanding of own experience and action; two developmental gains of high significance.

The insight that developmental gains are possible even in very old age is essential for lifespan developmental psychology. Human development is to be understood as a lifelong process characterized by multidimensionality and multidirectionality (Baltes 1987). Aging implies different processes of change in different dimensions of the person; in each dimension gains and losses can be observed simultaneously; changes in one dimension are a poor predictor of changes in other dimensions. Accumulated and organized experiences, knowledge systems, and strategies for coping effectively with familiar problems and tasks are important developmental gains (in the sense of psychological growth) in older adulthood; important developmental losses do occur in physiological and neurophysiological functions and processes, c.f. cognitive flexibility, coping with unfamiliar problems and tasks, and speed of information processing (which itself decrease performance of short-term memory) (for an overview see Kruse and Rudinger 1997).

From the perspective of this article, education is a precondition for reaching developmental gains as well as for the opportunity to compensate for developmental losses (e.g., via the process of selective optimization with compensation) and for individual abilities to maintain or re-establish a personal satifying perspective on life in old age.

The first part of this article focuses on the importance of lifespan developmental psychology for understanding education in old age. In the following parts the competence-maintaining and competence-enhancing functions of education are discussed in the context of three topics: life competencies of the old as a human capital for society, productive life in old age, and potentials for development in old age.

2.2 Increase in Need for Culture

The second proposition summarizes the overall perspective on lifespan development associated with culture and culture-based processes. Among these cultural resources are physical structures, the world of economics as well as that of medical and physical technology, but also cognitive skills such as formal logic, literacy, and written documents. The argument for an age-related increase in the ‘need’ for culture has two parts. First, for human ontogeny to have reached increasingly high levels of functioning across historical time, whether in physical or psychological domains, there had to be a conjoint evolutionary increase in the richness and dissemination of the resources and ‘opportunities’ of culture. The second argument for the proposition relates to the biological weakening associated with age. That is, the older we are, the more we need culture-based resources to generate and maintain high levels of functioning. For instance, in old age, it generally takes more time and practice to attain the same amount of learning gains than in early adulthood (see next).

From a lifespan perspective, development is defined as selective age-related change in adaptive capacity. Lifespan development comprises gains and losses at every point in the lifespan. The balance between gains and losses, however, changes towards an over-representation of losses at higher ages. Lifespan psychology views development as comprising more than what we are able to observe at a given point in historical time. Throughout the lifespan, development is full of potential, even though this potential diminishes with age. Two major forces underlie lifespan development: biology and culture. Owing to evolutionary principles, biology becomes less and less supportive with age, whereas culture continues to be supportive and compensates for biology-based decline—however, with decreasing efficiency over the lifespan. The biological and cultural influences on development are organized by three major logics: age, history, and the individual. Lifespan development is a process of transactional adaptation. Human beings create and are created by their developmental contexts. A comprehensive understanding of development necessitates the systemic integration of multiple disciplines. Lifespan psychology defines successful human development as the maximization of gains and the minimization of losses and recommends selection, optimization, and compensation as the three central mechanisms to attain it.

Developmental tasks and critical life events are considered as concepts that are crucial to the understanding of life-span development. Developmental tasks are seen to be jointly produced by the processes of biological maturation, the demands, constraints, and opportunities provided by the environment, as well as the desires and strivings that characterize each individual. As primarily age-normative transitions, they provide high levels of predictability and clarity of the life course, and they are also seen to set the stage for developmental goals to be attained within particular age spans. In contrast, critical life events are clearly non-age-related, do occur with lower probability, and do happen only to few people (at least, people of the same age) more or less by chance. These types of events may be equated with turning points in the individual life span that result in one of three developmental outcomes: psychological growth, return to the precrisis level of functioning (homeostasis), or psychological and/or physical dysfunctioning. Both concepts have focused our attention on road maps for human lives and regular life paths, on the one hand, and on the developmental plasticity during critical turning points, on the other.

Other Nursing Research

The brief description below is based on two comprehensive summaries of two decades of research reviews (1983–2003) published in the Annual Review of Nursing Research (ARNR). Both summaries use similar categories of content foci or themes; thus, facilitating comparisons of content themes in nursing research over two decades. The content categories used are: life span development, clinical or nursing practice research, research on nursing care delivery, research on professional issues, educational research in nursing, and international nursing research. Life span development has subcategories such as maternal-child health, infants, and young children; school-age children and adolescents; adulthood; older adult issues and problems; and family research. During these two decades, research in life span development was common, with a total of 25 reviews for the first decade and 49 reviews for the second decade.

Nursing Practice Research also has subcategories such as nursing diagnoses and interventions; symptoms and problems; risk behaviors and forms of abuse; physiologic mechanisms and biologic rhythms; care problems of specific diseases; research in nursing specialty areas; crises, grief, loss, and bereavement; and research on special populations such as rural health; health among minorities, migrants, the homeless. The largest number of review chapters published in ARNR is in the Nursing Practice Research category, with a total of 42 reviews for the first decade and 61 for the second decade.

Commonly studied were combinations of a nursing practice research problem within a specific age cohort or subcategory of the lifespan. Examples of reviews reflecting these combined categories include: Fatigue During the Childbearing Period, Prenatal and Parenting Programs for Adolescent Mothers; Child Sexual Abuse: Initial Effects; Motivation for Physical Activity Among Children and Adolescents; Children with Epilepsy: Quality of Life and Psychosocial Needs; Family Interventions to Prevent Substance Abuse: Children and Adolescents; Women as Mothers and Grandmothers; Health Promotion for Family Caregivers of Chronically Ill Elders; End-of-Life Care for Older Adults in ICUs; Interventions for Children with Diabetes and their Families; Quality of Life and Caregiving in Technological Home Care; and Sleep Promotion in Adults (ARNR, 1994–2002). Also, nursing research in other countries (Scotland, Canada, Philippines, Korea, Israel, Brazil, Taiwan, Italy) has been reviewed (ARNR, 1984, 1986, 1988, 1994, 1996, 1997, 1999). Social science methods mentioned above were used in many of the studies reviewed.

Nurse researchers have used several publication guides (e.g., the American Psychological Association). Nursing, medical, social science, and other journals (see Further Reading) are used for research dissemination, as is the Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL) (www.cinahl.com). Another key bibliographic resource for nursing research is MEDLINE, at the U.S. National Library of Medicine (www.nlm.gov).

2 The Emergence of Life Course Theory

Life course ideas coalesced in a theoretical orientation during the 1960s and 1970s. One of the crystallizing forces came from longitudinal studies of children that were extended into adulthood during the 1940s—examples include the Oakland and Berkeley Growth Studies, and the Guidance Study at the University of California, Berkeley. The life-span extension of these studies gave fresh momentum to the study of adult development at a time when few longitudinal studies were underway. Three challenges confronted investigators in the social and behavioral sciences: (a) to replace child-based, growth-oriented accounts of development with concepts that apply to development and aging across the life course; (b) to think about how human lives are socially organized and evolve over time; and (c) to relate lives to an ever-changing society.

The first challenge led to the formulation of life-span concepts of development, especially within the expanding field of life-span developmental psychology (see Lifespan Development, Theory of). Distinctive principles include the relative plasticity and agency of the aging organism, the life-long interaction of person and social context, and the multidirectionality of life-span development. Differentiating and cumulating experiences across the life span tend to generate complementary aging dynamics (Dannefer 1987): (a) greater heterogeneity between individuals over time, and (b) enhanced continuity within individuals. Sociological concepts of life-span development include trajectory, transition, and turning point, as well as the cumulation of advantages and disadvantages over the life course.

Life-span thinking on human development and aging occurred initially with little attention to a well-established ‘role theoretical perspective’ on human lives, one that dates back at least to Thomas and Znaniecki's (1918–20) The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. Role and relationship theories provided a way of thinking about socialization, generational succession, and social networks into the 1960s. The central concept at the time was life cycle; it depicted life organization in terms of social relationships and generational succession through the kinship system. The missing element was temporality. Life cycle models did not specify the timing of role entries or exits or the duration of time-in-role. Also, generational membership failed to locate people with precision in historical time and thus according to social change.

These limitations were addressed by theory and research on age and time. The path-breaking work of Neugarten (1968) documented substantial life variations in social roles by age. Contrary to established views (Eisenstadt 1956), she found that people of the same age varied significantly in the pace and sequencing of life transitions. Ever since this research, the differential timing and order of events has been among the most active topics of life course study, especially in the transition to adulthood (Heinz 1999).

Another age-based contribution to life course theory came from an appreciation of historical variations in people's experiences and lives (Ryder 1965, Riley et al. 1972). Ryder proposed the term ‘cohort’ as a concept for studying the life course in relation to social change. Cohort refers to the age at which people enter the system; thus, a birth cohort locates people in history according to their birth year. Ryder's life stage principle states that the impact of historical change on the life course reflects the life stage at which the change was experienced (see Age, Sociology of).

The three streams of life course theory (social relations/life cycle, age, and life-span concepts of development) came together in a study of children who were born in the early 1920s, grew up in the Great Depression, and then entered service roles in the Second World War (Elder 1974 (orig.), 1998 (new edn.)). The study began with ideas from studies of social relations, such as generation, socialization, and social roles, but soon turned to the analytic meanings of age for ways of linking family and individual experience to historical change, and for identifying age-graded trajectories across the life course. The project tested Ryder's life-stage hypothesis by comparing the effects of drastic income loss in the Great Depression on the life experience of the Oakland cohort members (born 1920–1) with that of a younger Berkeley cohort, born at the upper end of the 1920s. Consistent with the life-stage hypothesis, the younger boys in particular were more adversely affected by family hardship, when compared to the older boys, though such differences faded in the adult years through the impact of military service, family support, and higher education.

By the 1990s, the life course had become a general theoretical framework for the study of lives, human development, and aging (Binstock and George 1996). This development was coupled with the growth of longitudinal studies and the emergence of new methodologies for the collection and analysis of life history data (Giele and Elder 1998, Bryk and Raudenbusch 1992).

4 Future Directions

Continuing research on proactivity in major life transitions, as well as in everyday behavior, should foster an increased understanding of the social cognitive and developmental underpinnings of coping. To date, the coping literature has been characterized by excessive reliance on retrospective self-reports of coping over long intervals and by coping measurements that sum together many different kinds of activities undertaken to solve problems, regulate emotions, and shift priorities in the face of adversity. Careful delineation of the component activities of proactivity, such as regulation of attention, planning, mental simulation, and the elicitation and use of feedback about the success of one's coping efforts, how such components develop (Friedman and Scholnick 1997) and influence lifespan development (Freund and Baltes 1998), and how they are affected by personal, social, and environmental factors will add greatly to the understanding of successful proactivity and, ultimately, inform interventions to foster proactivity in health, educational, and work settings (Schwarzer 2000).

Additionally, increased attention to the role of social factors in successful proactivity may prove fruitful. In the aging and workplace examples, people entering new environments acted quickly to cultivate social resources. Social resources may play a key role in proactive coping, as people use the opinions and outcomes of others to make predictions about what the future might hold for themselves (Aspinwall 1997) and actively enlist others' assistance in appraising and managing potential stressors. Further, understanding how people prevent losses of social resources by altering their behavior to counteract expected discrimination (Miller and Myers 1998) or by responding to incipient problems in close relationships may prove to be important in understanding mental and physical health outcomes over time.

Finally, the study of proactivity may be expanded to include thoughts and actions in the service of not only preventing adverse outcomes, but also creating future opportunities (Schwarzer 2000). Future efforts to understand both kinds of proactivity may increase our understanding of people's capacity to shape their environments and outcomes through their capacities for future-oriented thinking and action.

3 Conclusion: Courses and Conditions of Successful Development

In terms of cognitive functions, social integration, and self-regulation, human development features a considerable amount of plasticity (Baltes et al. 1998), which not only makes up the core prerequisite for the dynamics of resilience and the coping processes discussed here, but indeed is also a general precondition for the very possibility of lifespan development. Self-regulation processes are both a central criterion for adaptation processes on the one hand and they substantially control them on the other.

Personal well-being and psychological health, and social integration can only be maintained and improved if the individual can be protected against unfavorable conditions by resilient resource constellations, if personal and social coping resources can help to cushion and compensate for the crises and losses that will inevitably occur, and if the individual capacity to act is largely maintained, whether by stabilizing the required conditions or by finding a new orientation toward achievable objectives. Actually, all of these aspects can be seen both as the products and the producers of successful development.

Development essentially consists in upholding and implementing the individual's capacity to adapt to the discrepancies in new situations and developmental tasks as he or she seeks (via assimilation or accommodation) to attain a solution to, or dissolution of, the discrepancies that are generating a crisis or creating a burden, if these are unavoidable in the long run. Thus, successful development implies a progressive adaptation which simultaneously maintains or indeed expands this plasticity and adaptivity. As far as we know today, this is possible—and usual—at least up to the latest years of very old age (Baltes 1997). That leads to the somewhat tautological-sounding statement that successful development essentially means ensuring that development, i.e., progressive adaptation, will always be possible and really will occur.

The emerging perspective of adaptivity and activity as the roots of successful human development suggests essential new research perspectives focusing on sources of resiliency and vulnerability at any stage of human development. Moreover, even if the preconditions and processes are known which provide successful development, the ways to improve the individual's capacity to acquire or to use them are still to be investigated. Thus, studies in applied developmental science are needed in order to discover techniques and strategies of individual and social improvement of both of these core conditions, with respect to special interventions, e.g., in the case of juvenile delinquency, as well as with respect to primary prevention of developmental crises, e.g., in the case of successful aging in very old age.