Agency and Structure in Human Development Agency and Structure in Human Development ECCLES

Over the course of my career, my intellectual energies have focused on academic achievement and motivation, subjects that stand at the intersection of psychology and sociology. It was the life course paradigm formulated by Glen H. Elder, Jr., that animated my thinking about the sociological component of my research. Today, Elder’s perspective is widely appreciated but in the 1970s, during a formative period of my career, this was not the case. Indeed, the success of life course sociology owed much to individual scholars applying the perspective to their own research, a challenging and exciting task best understood prospectively. I first became aware of Glen’s work while I was a graduate student at UCLA in the years between 1969 and 1974. I was a graduate student in psychology in a department that focused largely on laboratory studies of children and college students. I went there for family reasons rather than the relevance of developmental faculty members’ research for my interests – which focused on a more life course perspective on education and achievement. Needless to say, I felt a bit like the proverbial “fish out of water” in the UCLA program until I discovered Glen’s work. His early work on the role of the family and the larger cultural and historical setting in which people grew up in shaping educational patterns was exactly what I had been looking for. His 1967 paper “Age integration and socialization in an educational setting”, published in the Harvard Educational Review, opened