continue to age a succession of life structures forms a life course, our
own personal history .
As a technique for studying the structure of life at the day-to-day
level, Little (1983) has proposed a new unit of analysis, the personal
project . Personal projects are sets of acts intended to achieve a goal; they
range from “getting a better job” to “overcoming my shyness” to “goingto the ballet” (p. 293). Individuals appear to be able to list the projectsthat concern them at any given time quite easily and can then rate themon such dimensions as importance, difficulty , control, and absorption(the degrees to which they are involved in and preoccupied with them).One advantage of personal projects as units of analysis is that they pro -
vide a detailed specification of the life structure at a single time, one
that is phenomenologically real to the individual. An occupational his -
tory that includes only type of work and dates of hiring, promotion, and
firing misses the richness that can be drawn from an analysis of per-sonal projects: Are job concerns central to life, or simply an economicnecessity? Are tasks part of an ongoing career plan or a series of unre-lated activities? Is the work pleasant or unpleasant, fascinating or dull,imposed or chosen?
Personal projects are also intriguing because the dimensions on
which they are rated can be related to dimensions of personality . Little,Lecci, and Watkinson (1992) reported that highly conscientious peoplefeel their projects are progressing well, that open people believe theirprojects are particularly meaningful, and that those high in Neuroticismfind their project stressful. These kinds of analyses help to spell out theimplications of personality traits and their influence on life at a molecu -
lar level.
On a larger scale, Helson, Mitchell, and Moane (1984) examined
effects of personality on social clock projects . Some life goals, such as
marrying, raising a family , and having a successful career, are sharedby nearly everyone in the culture and have a prescribed time course:There is a social clock by which we can tell if our life is progressingat the rate it should. Helson and her colleagues examined personalityscores gathered at the time of college graduation (between 1958 and1960) for a group of women they subsequently followed. Nearly allthe women of this group professed a desire to marry and start a fam -
ily . They found that “women who started their families on time may
be characterized as having been confident and assertive in college inaddition to having the motivations and skills to adjust in conventionalInfluences of Personality on the Life Course 221