RESUMO
The Covid-19 pandemic is shaking fundamental assumptions about the human life course in societies around the world. In this essay, we draw on our collective expertise to illustrate how a life course perspective can make critical contributions to understanding the pandemic's effects on individuals, families, and populations. We explore the pandemic's implications for the organization and experience of life transitions and trajectories within and across central domains: health, personal control and planning, social relationships and family, education, work and careers, and migration and mobility. We consider both the life course implications of being infected by the Covid-19 virus or attached to someone who has; and being affected by the pandemic's social, economic, cultural, and psychological consequences. It is our goal to offer some programmatic observations on which life course research and policies can build as the pandemic's short- and long-term consequences unfold.
RESUMO
We provide background information for a collection of articles that describe two-wave longitudinal findings derived from the first intensive follow-up of participants of the Berlin Aging Study (BASE). Multidisciplinary data were collected during 1995-1996 from 206 survivors approximately 4 years after baseline assessment (1990-1993). The strengths of the initial BASE design, in terms of a focus on very old age, multidisciplinary intensive assessment, and an examination of selectivity issues, were maintained in this longitudinal extension of the study.
