Throughout my career I have been motivated by C. Wright Mills’ challenge to sociologists that we pursue the “intersection of biography and history in social structure,” that is, the study of the biographical factors that bring the person to positions in the social structure and the set of historical factors that bring the positions to the person (see Mills, The Sociological Imagination, 1959).
Consistent with Mills’ challenge, my interests include a wide range of phenomena concerned with the connection of human development and social change. I am probably best known for my work on the impacts of demographic and historical processes on individual cognitive, ideological and attitudinal development over the life span. One study, which I worked on with Ron Cohen and Theodore Newcomb (Political Attitudes Over the Life-Span: The Bennington Women After Fifty Years, Wisconsin Press, 1991), focused on the lifelong development of attitudes and political identities within the context of both social change and development of the life course. I have also maintained a research program on the study of the stability of human characteristics over the life span and am currently working on a study of the antecedents and consequences of cognitive functioning in middle and older age.
In addition to political socialization and life-span development, I have studied changes in the family (particularly parental child-rearing values and beliefs about sex-roles), educational institutions and religion. The common focus of this research is the role of environmental factors in shaping individual biographies over the life span. A common element in much of this work is a focus on the existence of the unique impacts of “generational” experiences on attitudes, beliefs and behavior.
More recently, in connection with my longstanding interest in social stratification, I have engaged in the study of the socio-environmental factors contributing to individual health and well being. My approach emphasizes a life span developmental perspective (including life cycle processes and life course events and transitions) on the social origins of health disparities. My ongoing research in this area focuses specifically on the contributions of social inequalities, particularly those tied to family background, gender, race-ethnicity and achieved socioeconomic status, to the prevalence and incidence of health conditions in broad population-based samples, focusing particularly on social inequalities and metabolic syndrome, diabetes and cardiovascular disease in midlife and older age.