Key Words life course, adulthood, agency, social structure, demography, social stratification

* Abstract The transition to adulthood has become a thriving area of research in life course studies. This review is organized around two of the field's emerging themes. The first theme is the increasing variability in pathways to adult roles through historical time. The second theme is a heightened sensitivity to transition behaviors as developmental processes. Accounts of such processes typically examine the active efforts of young people to shape their biographies or the socially structured opportunities and limitations that define pathways into adulthood. By joining these concepts, I suggest new lines of inquiry that focus on the interplay between agency and social structures in the shaping of lives.

OVERVIEW

In their 1986 contribution to the Annual Review of Sociology, Hogan & Astone proposed a population-based, dynamic approach to the transition to adulthood. Accordingly, they emphasized the contextual and institutional factors that explain differences in the transition to adult roles across different societies, among social strata within a society, and through historical time. Research since then has consolidated and expanded this view considerably, focusing on markers of the transition to adulthood. These markers include leaving school, starting a full-time job, leaving the home of origin, getting married, and becoming a parent for the first time. Many investigations have emphasized central tendencies in these life course events (for example, the median age at first marriage). Research of the past two decades, however, has increasingly focused on the variability of these markers (George 1993, Rindfuss et al 1987), including their dispersion (for example, variation in age at first marriage), their variable sequ encing, their degree of co-occurrence, and the duration of intervals among them.

This review explores two central themes. First, trends reveal significant changes in the transition to adulthood through historical time. Part one evaluates influential arguments that the modernization of societies has coincided with the standardization and individualization of the life course. Standardization appears in the increasing "compactness" in the ages of school completion, marriage, parenthood, and beginning one's career, whereas individualization is found in increasingly diverse sequences of these markers. In turn, these trends have been complicated by short-term economic fluctuations and discrete historical events and, within cohorts, by social inequalities such as gender, race, and socioeconomic status.

Greater diversity in the transition to adulthood has inspired research that explores the second theme, the widespread adoption of a developmental stance by sociologists as they link the experiences of youth and adulthood. The transition to adulthood is now viewed less as a discrete set of experiences that are temporally bounded in the life course and more as an integral part of a biography that reflects the early experiences of youth and also that shapes later life. Part two considers this developmental stance as it reflects both young people's active efforts to shape their biographies and the structured set of opportunities and limitations that define pathways into adulthood. In the concluding section of this essay, I identify several methodological innovations that...