Question

Describe a normative event and a idiosyncratic event. What are some normative events that typically occur in young adulthood? How might a idiosyncratic event shape /impact the life of young adult?

Your response should be 5 paragraphs in length. Be mindful of using proper grammar and spelling. Please be specific in your example.

Answer 1

Normative age-graded influences are those influences within the life course that are correlated with chronological age. For example, marriage and retirement are two normative age-graded influences. These influences are the result of either biological or environmental determinants or an interaction of the two. Puberty and menopause would be examples of biological determinants; graduation and retirement would be examples of environmental determinants. Most environmental determinants fall into one of three categories: family life cycle, education, and occupational. Age-related events are considered normative if they occur with great frequency and are similar with respect to duration and timing for the majority of the population within a culture. It should be noted that each culture or subculture has its own set of age-graded normative influences. Thus, for a young girl to be pregnant at 15 years of age would be nonnormative in much of the American culture but normative for other cultures.

The distinctions about norm-related events- First, there are nomophoric events: events that have norm-related consequences, that is, consequence established ab extra by some body of norms or rules. Birth, for instance, while being a perfectly natural event, has a normative valency (notably, in the Italian system, the acquisition of the so-called “capacità giuridica”). Second, there are what I call nomogonic events, that is, events that are intrinsically normative, events that generate norms or values, ex normative nihilo, as it were. Possible examples are revolutions, referenda, customs or, in certain legal systems such as common law, prior court sentences. (Here I am using examples taken from the law, but the phenomenon I am describing is not at all confined to the legal domain. One can easily think of moral systems, or “un-legal” (extralegal) systems, such as criminal organizations or mafias.)

Idiosyncratic Events are unexpected life events which are not always disastrous such as caring for a disabled or elderly family member, winning a lottery or accidental death, sudden loss of income, being taken hostage, murder, assault, incest etc. Non-normative stressors are atypical for all families that is non-normative stressors are idiosyncratic challenges and events not typically present in families. Idiosyncratic events are influences which don’t influence every member of a set in the same way. The term normative refers to something that affects everyone in a culture at the same time, so idiosyncratic implies it affects everyone differently (or not at all).

In psychology, they’re the things that change an individual’s life but not the lives of other people in the same way. They can be very important in a person’s life, but they aren’t universal and don’t have patterns or predictable sequences that we can easily see. They don’t happen at a set time; instead, they are unexpected in the lives of those they affect. Although they can happen at any life stage, nonnormative life events are thought to be particularly significant for middle-aged and older adults (Baltes et al., 1980, cited in Woolf, 1998).

More generally, idiosyncratic influences are random, unpredictable influences that affect one member (or a random sample of members) of a larger data set.

For Example- death of a friend in a road accident, an unexpected major disease diagnosis, or winning the lottery are all examples of nonnormative influences on an individual.

A particular event may be a nonnormative influence event from one perspective and not from another. For instance, from the perspective of a sociologist studying personal finance and spending, an unexpected divorce may consist of a nonnormative influence on a person’s life. However, from a family sociologist’s viewpoint, the divorce might not have been characterized as either inexplicable, unpredictable, or random: it had its roots in certain social relations and/or actions long before.