The Salience of Age in the Life Course

This article outlines several emerging debates on the salience of age in the life course. A set of recent data, based on interviews with a random sample of 319 adults in the Chicago metropolitan area, are then presented to shed new light on aspects of those debates. The data concern individuals’ perceptions of the relevance of age for a set of fourteen life course transitions. These transitions are clustered into three separate spheres – the sphere of family, the sphere of education and work, and the sphere of health and death. We examine the extent to which individuals approach those domains, and the life course as a whole, with age at the front of their minds, and whether people with certain characteristics seem more or less inclined to do so. While age was generally considered relevant for most of the transitions in each sphere, it was most salient in the sphere of family, then in the sphere of education and work, and finally in the sphere of health and death. Higher levels of salience also existed for men in all three spheres. Surprisingly, racial status was the only personal characteristic for which consistent differences in age salience were found in the sphere of family, the sphere of education and work, and for the life course as a whole. The absence of other expected differences is also discussed.