This is a longitudinal study of twenty-one U.S. Peace Corps Volunteers, first interviewed in the mid-1960s during their tour of service in the Republic of the Philippines and then twenty years later as middle-aged adults. Life events reported after their service and the high degree of response agreement in the two interviews confirm that their Peace Corps experience constituted a turning point in their life courses. The study reviews the literature on turning points, proposes an appropriate definition for the concept, identifies conditions that promote turning points, especially for youth, and indicates directions for future research.

In recent years, the study of aging has come to be increasingly multidisciplinary and to encompass the whole life course. The well established life history approach has been reformulated to include the macro-structural and cultural context of aging. Over the past decade research on adult development and aging, cohort differences in aging patterns, and historical changes in life course differentiation has challenged the validity of the established "stability" and "ordered change" theories of aging. An "aleatoric" account of aging, which calls attention to the flexibility of developmental patterns, has been proposed in their stead. Consistent with this development is the need to replace the old conception of the self as a passive object of outside social forces with a new conception of the self as an active, self-reflexive agent in society. The author demonstrates the utility of certain core concepts in social phenomenology and ethnomethodology, in particular Schutz's concept of biographical work, for developing this new conception of the self. It is proposed that more attention to the practical procedures of reality construction involved in biographical work would provide the epistemological basis and conceptual clarity needed for empirical research on the dynamics of life histories.

The period of the sixties marked the emergence of a distinctive generational ideology among a substantial segment of American youth. This “peace and love” ideology featured a high degree of age group consciousness and unique integration of life style and political concerns, the psychological foundation for which was laid by the increased differentiation of age roles and de‐differentiation of sex roles associated with advanced industrial development. The expansion of higher education, emergence of the multibillion dollar youth market, and growth of the mass media provided the means by which many such youth were able to achieve consciousness of their common interests and join active generation units with distinctive styles of expression. The war in Indochina constituted the traumatic episode which differentiated the various age groups in America and galvanized the middle class, college segment of the youth cohort into action.

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