Biographical Sequencing and Activism

这是一个研究参与政治活动和社会运动如何影响人们关于工作、教育、婚姻和生育的决定的提案。所有参加1964年密西西比自由暑期项目的申请者将被与一个匹配的对照组进行比较。研究人员建议更新1988年自由之夏项目参与者的生活史，以获得没有参加自由之夏项目的个人样本的可比生命历程数据，并开发和管理一份调查问卷，重点关注政治活动与生命历程之间关系的主观维度。该研究的核心问题之一将是参与诸如“自由暑期计划”之类的社会运动如何影响生活选择和职业轨迹。另一个同样重要的问题是，了解婚姻和生育等重大生活事件是如何以及为什么常常限制政治活动的。这个项目将有助于我们理解政治激进主义与生命历程之间的相互关系，它也将提供对一群人的生活模式的见解，这些人在动荡的20世纪60年代经历了年轻的成年期。

This is a proposal to study the how participation in political activism and social movements affects people's decisions about work, education, marriage, and childbearing. All applicants to the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer Project will be compared to a matched comparison group. The investigators propose to update the life histories of participants in the Freedom Summer Project previously surveyed in 1988, to obtain comparable life-course data for a sample of individuals who did not participate in the Freedom Summer Project, and to develop and administer a questionnaire focusing on the subjective dimensions of the relationship between political activism and the life course. One of the central questions in the study will be how participation in social movements such as the Freedom Summer Project have influenced life choices and career trajectories. An equally important question will be to understand how and why major life events such as marriage and childbearing often serve to constrain political activism. This project will contribute to our understanding of the interrelations between political activism and the life course, and it will also provide insights into the life patterns of a cohort of people who lived through young adulthood during the turbulent decade of the 1960s.