Life-span Development - Frameworks, Accounts and Strategies

This thorough revision of the highly successful first edition of Life-Span Development offers the reader a wide-ranging and thought provoking account of human development throughout the lifespan. The lifespan approach emphasises that development does not stop when we cease to be adolescents but goes on throughout adulthood and into old age.

In initial chapters Leonie Sugarman outlines the issues surrounding the notion of development and how it can be studied, including reviews of the work of key theorists Erikson, Levinson and Gould. She goes on to consider the different ways in which the life course can be construed: as a series of age-related stages; as a cumulative sequence; as a series of developmental tasks; as a series of key life events and transitions or as a narrative construction which creates a sense of dynamic continuity. A final chapter looks at how people cope, the resources that are available and the theoretical and practical issues regarding interventions to a