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Each of the 516 participants in the Berlin Aging Study (BASE) has a unique biography and his or her own way of dealing with the positive and negative aspects of old age. At the same time, subgroups in BASE have also had some “objectively” common experiences. Cohorts have lived through the same historical events and changes in German society and, in old age, subgroups of individuals often have an apparently similar status with regard to some life domains (e.g., marital or financial status). This chapter aims to provide an initial sense of the diverse life trajectories in the biographies of BASE participants that arise from the interplay between common and unique life experiences. Three men and three women were selected for deeper consideration in this chapter because of their above- or below-average status on objective life conditions or because they represented statistically normative cases. Introduction Other chapters of this book describe group-level differences across a broad range of life conditions and domains of functioning. The unique characteristics of the lives and subjective experiences of individuals have only been hinted at (e.g., in scatterplots). In this chapter the biographies of six participants in BASE take center stage. The technique of using biographical approaches to supplement quantitative nomothetic methods has received renewed attention in recent years, and there has been much discussion about appropriate methods (for an overview see the Ageing and Society Special Issue on Ageing, Biography and Practice, 1996; Birren, Kenyon, Ruth, Schroots, & Svensson, 1996; Reker & Wong, 1988).
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