Today’s world is one of experts.  There are doctors who are experts on the lymphatic system, teachers who are experts on the French Revolution, and lawyers who are experts on the criminal justice system.  However, the world we live in is not so compartmentalized.  In every situation, from school, to health, to work, there is a vast network of interrelatedness, and an event in one spectrum of one’s life will definitely cause some reaction in all other areas.  To truly understand a person, one must develop a holistic view of the human life.  The life course perspective is a tool that has been developed over the past 45 years (Hutchinson 11) by researchers of a variety of disciplines in order to understand the underlying causes of disease, health, and other social phenomena.

Researchers use 5 basic criteria when studying a person using the life course perspective: cohorts, transitions, trajectories, life events and turning points.  Each of these criteria helps to bring to the surface root causes of behavioral and disease manifestations in a persons life.  People can be understood in the context of their cohort, the individuals who were born at the same historical time and faced the same social changes as they did. Members of large cohorts can find creative strategies for dealing with competition for resources. In some large cohorts, however, suicide rates are high, showing that not all cohorts deal with stress the same. Transitions in life change the role and status of individuals.  Graduating from high school, starting college, entering the workforce, pregnancy, marriage and death of loved ones are all examples of transitions that can propel and individual into an entirely new role.  Taken together, transitions form trajectories.  Individuals have interlacing trajectories with the trajectories of their families.  Like raindrops on a pond, the spheres interact with all the other spheres to form complex interactions and interchanging roles.  Life events are those events that are seriously up heaving and may cause long-lasting psychological effects.  Turning points are events that create a complete change of life and viewpoint, changing the directions of ones life.

Viewing disease as an event caused by an assortment of socioeconomic and environmental factors fell out of favor in with medical doctors in more recent times.  It has been the common paradigm that disease is due to environmental factors and that how a person was raised or the events that directed his life were not of import.  However, recently things have been changing in the medical field.  In a recent article two doctors used the life course perspective to look at socioeconomic and behavioral influences on cardiovascular disease mortality. According to the life-course view, factors acting in early life accumulate and interact with factors acting in later life in the production of adulthood disease. The results of their study were conclusive with their hypothesis, that CVD risk is influenced in a cumulative fashion by socioeconomic and behavioral factors acting throughout the life course.  (Smith & Hart 2002).

The life course perspective is changing the way physicians look at disease and health.  It provides an ecological understanding of individual people by examining phenomena at the nexus of social pathways, developmental or health trajectories, and social change. A life course paradigm provides a way of thinking about patients in both proximal (eg. lived lives and family) and distal (eg. health care system) contexts over a life span (Daaleman & Elder 2007).   Health is determined not just by a couple of environmental factors but is a build up of factors,  where risk increases as factors increase.  People who are disadvantaged with respect to a given exposure tend to be disadvantaged with respect to others.  There are clear causal chains acting in this regard. Unfavorable childhood social circumstances increase the risk of finishing education with few credentials, which in turn leads to an unfavorable occupational trajectory in adulthood and to membership in social groups that encourage the development and maintenance of certain patterns of health-damaging behaviors (Smith & Hart 2002).