The Availability of Care for Late-Middle-Aged Adults With Chronic ...

It emphasizes the importance of considering human lives and choices in the context of the broader social structure and historical time, as well as the developmental timing of lives within these broader social structures. Put another way, a person’s life course consists of a series of transitions and trajectories that are taking place within a specific historical context and personal biography, and are affected by the interdependence of the individual’s life with the lives of others (George, 2002). Individuals and their circumstances, therefore, cannot be studied in isolation.

Just as the timing of a health transition (i.e., the age at which a person becomes ill) may have important consequences for the course of the illness (George, 2002), the timing may also have important consequences on the type and amount of help a person receives when their functioning becomes limited. Individuals who require assistance with activities of daily living rely, for the most part, on the support of other individuals. As the life course perspective suggests, the amount and type of this support depends not only on the characteristics of the individual in need (e.g., demographics, functional capacity, resources, and preferences) but also on the characteristics of his or her available social network and support. These characteristics reflect both the developmental stage of the life condition (i.e., being functionally limited in late midlife vs. old age) and historical timing of individual lives (i.e., the demographic and family transitions of the late 20th century have differentially affected today’s late-middle-aged, young old, and older old cohorts). Both of these two concepts are examined further in later text.

Litwak’s task-specificity model as applied to caregiving suggests that there is an order that is followed when choosing caregivers (Litwak, 1985; Messeri, Silverstein, & Litwak, 1993).