Opportunity and Uncertainty

This text examines events in the lives of a generation of Ontario residents who graduated from grade twelve in 1973. The study recreates the world of the early 1970s in which these high school students faced the future. It recounts their educational and occupational experiences, follows their vocational and career pathways during the subsequent decade, and searches for patterns in their personal and family lives through the late 1980s and early 1990s. This interdisciplinary project aims to provide a wealth of information about the links between schooling and employment in a time of economic instability and address the different ways in which women and men attempt to reconcile familial and occupational demands. The study employs life course theory, which explores the dynamic relationship between the individual and the social order. Structural forces such as social class, gender, ethnicity, and race played an role in the lives of the Class of '73.
Using survey research, historical documentation, in-depth interviews, and personal biographies, the study seeks to explain one generation's emergence from adolescence into adulthood in an era characterised by both opportunity and uncertainty.