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Sheldon S. Tobin, Personhood in Advanced Old Age: Implications for Practice , Springer Publishing Company, New York, 1991, 186 pp., £22.95, ISBN 0 826 17580 5.

timing and nature of later events. The approach has become quite important in quantitative social science in the last decade as researchers have begun using statistical methods first applied in biostatistics and engineering. Yet, a number of problems remain, including data quality and matching the statistical model to the substantive problem. Issues of this sort are discussed in chapters by Andrew Miles and David Vincent, Catherine Marsh and Jonathan Gershuny, Sylvia Walby, and Meredith Baker and Peter Elias. The second answer to the question of what one might do with life history data emphasizes the data's subjective nature. For example, Peter G. Coleman's excellent chapter on ' Ageing and life history: the meaning of reminiscence in late life' examines the social and psychological factors affecting the individual's construction of meaning in his or her life history. An implication is that the individual's reports of events are influenced by the meaning given to the events. Subjectivity also enters historical documents. David Amigoni's very interesting chapter on 'Life histories and the cultural politics of historical knowing: the Dictionary of National Biography and the late nineteenth-century political field' argues that the late nineteenth century life history project of the Dictionary of National Biography reflected the views of the period's cultural elite. Editors selected entries and material and presented them in a style calculated to appeal to the intended audience. Hence these reports tell us as much about the process that produced them as about their subjects. Daniel Bertaux's chapter also addresses issues of subjective meaning. While event history and subjective meaning approaches both analyse life history data, their research questions and practitioners are ordinarily quite distant. Their common concern with time-based data provides some common ground, for example, the social constructionist focus on the effect of psychological and social factors on life history reports is paralleled by the event history concern with the accuracy of individual reports. The relation between the two approaches is well handled in Paul Bellaby's chapter, 'Histories of sickness: making use of multiple accounts of the same process.' While the common ground is apparent in this and other contributions, this volume is best described as one that separately examines recent developments in two distinct approaches to life history analysis.