Communication across the Life Span

Background

Scholars of sociology and cognitive psychology were the first to formally study the life progression of human behavior. Sociologists prefer the term life course to life span and examine the effects on social policy of changing demographics. Psychologists are more interested in individual cognitive changes across the life span. Some, such as Laura Berk, who did much of the research on the developmental function of private speech, may refer to their specialty as human development. Particularly in psychology, life span work arose from the study of early childhood development. In the 1920s, Jean Piaget systematically studied the cognitive development of very young children and assumed that development ended with the teen years. But life continues.

The premise of any life span approach to human behavior is that the potential for human development extends across the life span. In the communication discipline, the key factor in human development is spoken symbolic communication, which makes possible self-directed change.

In 1989 Jon F. Nussbaum, inspired by the founding work of other social scientists, was the first communication scholar to formally articulate a life span perspective. His view is that a life span perspective can subsume all other communication theories under its umbrella. However, as both Nussbaum and Nikolas Coupland, a sociolinguist, pointed out a few years later, the early work in communication development did not conceptualize language and interaction as constitutive of life span experiences, meaning that people come to understand such experiences in terms of how they actually communicate about these experiences. And this is an important distinction for communication theorists to make. Although sociolinguists and psycholinguists do acknowledge the constitutive nature of language, communication theorists are best positioned to explain the link from spoken symbolic interaction to individual identity and distinctively human experience. However, the empirical research necessary to support this link rarely appears in the communication literature. One [Page 121]reason for this gap is that life span methodologies are complicated and take time to execute well. Perhaps a more important reason is the relative newness of life span study and the resulting dearth of graduate-level coursework in life span theory and methods.

Methodological Concerns

Sophisticated methods for studying life span changes arose from the limitations found in existing research designs. In 1988, Paul Baltes, Hayne Reese, and John Nesselroade wrote the book, literally, on research methods for life span developmental psychology. Communication studies of life span change using the simplest appropriate sampling designs—cross-sectional and longitudinal—have appeared in the past decade or two.

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