Despite the well-established consensus on the need for an interdisciplinary
research paradigm to understand the unfolding of human lives within their social
context, existing empirical research rarely embraces this belief. This volume
aims at examining the feasibility and hurdles of interdisciplinarity specific to
given research fields by bringing together leading North-American and European
researchers in sociology, psychology, social psychology and social demography,
all highly concerned with fostering an interdisciplinary perspective for the
study of the human life course. The contributions are organized along four major
axes, three of them substantive (agency and structure, transitions, and
biographical re-constructions) and one methodological (methodological
innovations), leaving ample leeway for the contributions to