"Invitation to the Life Course: Toward New Understandings of Later Life discusses in depth the challenges of age, time, and social contexts for the study of aging and later life. Understanding aging (as a process) and later life (as a period) must be accompanied by serious attention to the life course. This brings significant challenges related to time, as gerontologists must describe and explain life patterns over many decades.

It also brings significant challenges related to place, as gerontologists must examine how social contexts structure pathways into and through later life, and how those contexts affect the nature and meaning of experiences along the way.".

"Invitation to the Life Course explores how greater attention to these matters might revolutionize scholarship on aging and later life. How might it shift the questions we ask and theories we use? How might it alter how we collect, analyze, and interpret data? And how might it affect how we make and evaluate social policies and programs? It also considers the barriers that prevent the field from moving in these directions, and how those barriers might be overcome."--BOOK JACKET.