OBJECTIVE In this contribution unintended pregnancies are studied as a multidimensional concept from a life-course perspective. Standardized data on the prevalence of unwanted pregnancies in different stages of women's life course are combined with a qualitative analysis of the subjective meaning of "unwanted" and of subjective explanations of getting pregnant unintentionally. METHODS The stu...

A unique characteristic of family physicians is that they seek to understand individual patients within the context of their families and larger social environments. Unfortunately, the intellectual development of family medicine is hampered by the reliance on epidemiologic, health service, and biomedical paradigms that are limited in their contextual perspectives on patients' lives. However, an...

It remains unclear whether the frequency of marital coitus does in fact decline universally across the life course, what shape that decay normally takes, and what best accounts for it: increasing marriage duration, women's age or age of their partners. Using cross-sectional Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data of 91,744 non-abstaining women in their first marriage, a generalized linear mode...

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This article provides an overview of the role conscientiousness plays in the health process over the life course. The authors describe their research on the underlying structure of conscientiousness and how conscientiousness predicts social environmental factors and health behaviors that have a known relationship to health and longevity. The authors then show that conscientiousness continues to...

The questions posed by life course researchers often differ in fundamental ways from those posed by sociologists, developmental psychologists, or economists (Elder, 1998; Mayer & Tuma, 1990). For example, life course researchers often focus analytic attention on transitions marking adolescence or early adulthood and the roles and statuses accompanying such transitions (Hogan & Astone, 1986; Mod...

We identified 201 individuals who obtained IQs of 85 or below in high school and participated in the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (a prospective longitudinal study that followed sample members from age 18 through age 53). Their life course development was contrasted with their siblings who obtained IQs above 100. Life course outcomes were assessed in five domains: Education and Occupational Att...

Scientists can be remarkably flexible when investigating the nature of health and survival, taking advantage of populations from roundworms to humans to gain insight. Yet, flexibility can foster concern over generalizability. In this issue of IJE, Öberg et al. provide evidence on the generalizability of findings with twins, one of epidemiology’s most popular special populations, by showing that...

Life history approaches to the study of inequalities in health provide evidence that the biological and the social beginnings of life carry important aspects of the child's potential for adult health. Biological programming may set the operational parameters for certain organs and processes. Social factors in childhood influence the processes of biological development, and are the beginnings of...