The Adult Life Organization and Life History Study is an ongoing research project designed to advance knowledge concerning how American adult lives are built and maintained over the life span. From the very earliest years of our lives we are taught the critical and primary values that our society has come to recognize as necessary for stable and successful adult life. Desire and ambition, a commitment to achievement and the meritocracy, careful planning of our lives by making realistic choices, hard work, a good education, perseverance, and adherence to the norms of society that are laid down in the canons of law, legislation, and custom are the principal moral tools that we recognize. We could of course add to these principles the more contemporary concerns of guarding our health and seizing available opportunities when they come our way; and we could also include the vaguely but universally acknowledged role of "luck", "fate", or "destiny", depending on our theological or philosophical persuasion. By fervently applying these principles it is believed that we can become WHATEVER, as adults, we desire. This powerful ideology is, for many Americans, then, the real and only explanation that we need to account for what adult lives become in our society. What we will want to discover, however, as the research progresses is HOW the above principles, the embodiment of the unique American ethos, CONCRETELY work to bring about the actual creation of individual adult organization. Especially in the current economic climate which has transformed or brought into question a number of the bedrock ideals for success in our society, an honest appraisal of Adult life genesis is critical. As will be shown, at a time when many Americans have become disillusioned about their social futures, the track of our dominant institutions is toward a legally mandated, successful, life pattern that we are required by law to realize to a minimally expectable degree IF we are to be afforded all of the decency and respect as American Citizens to which we are entitled—all of this in the midst of massive social structural flux and change.
Life History Projects
Chai Institute, P.O. Box 192, Portales, NM 88130 email: chaiinstitute@ymail.com http://chai-institute.webstarts.com/
For Life Planning Research & Development