De l'espace de vie à l'espace d'une vie : décrire les espaces de vie individuels

摘要

A broad current of research in social sciences focuses on identifying intermediate units of analysis, between individuals and population. The notion of life space is one of them. It was first proposed by geographers, but then demographers, mostly interested in migration, picked up on the idea: individuals are no longer exclusively tied to their place of residence, but rather to every place with which they have a link.In empirical terms, the description of life spaces in demography involves two preliminary steps: delimiting the boundaries of the studied life space, according to its various dimensions; then finding the relevant specific sets of data.Several types of life space are examined, and indicators serving to draw them together in a quantitative approach are proposed. These life spaces are first defined at a given point in time. Yet space and time interact. First, the places that make up life spaces change. Second, life spaces evolve over individual life courses. Faced with such a complex sequence of transformations, trajectories need to be seen as a whole, forming what might be called the space of a whole life. Appropriate methods are needed for their analysis: innovative approaches for building life course typologies.