Vulnerability Across the Life Course

Abstract

This issue defines vulnerability as a key interdisciplinary concept for understanding life trajectories. Moreover, it develops a life course framework to study vulnerability along three structuring axes of research: multidimensionality, multilevel, and multidirectionality.

This issue on vulnerability across the life course brings together two fields of research that have much in common but require more dialogue between them. One field is the broad umbrella of life course research (Elder, 1985; Levy & the Pavie Team, 2007; Settersten, 1999), which is a fruitful interdisciplinary framework that has developed into a mainstream approach in social and psychological sciences since the 1980s. The second is the ever-growing field of research on vulnerability (Hanappi, Bernardi, & Spini, 2014), which originated in environmental vulnerability and has extended to the even larger fields of social and psychological vulnerabilities.

Life course and vulnerability research are mutually interested in how interindividual differences and social inequalities are constructed. Despite this shared interest, these fields have not yet merged into a unitary research frame, and much can be gained by filling this gap. Vulnerability is an inherently longitudinal, multidimensional, and multilevel research object: these features constitute building blocks of a life course approach to social phenomena (Spini, Hanappi, Bernardi, Oris, & Bickel, 2013; Spini, Bernardi, & Oris, this issue). There are many types of resources (i.e., economic, relational, cognitive, or institutional) that are available to individuals. These resources can be challenged by hazards and can be allocated and distributed in multiple combinations across life domains and time. Similar to the life course, vulnerability can be approached from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. This makes taking a life course approach to vulnerability an evident choice for researchers interested in advancing interdisciplinary research programs. Lastly, the current success of vulnerability goes hand-in-hand with a growing vagueness in its definition. Vulnerability has been transformed into an ideograph, which similar to concepts like equality, security, and freedom, has political relevance but is ill defined (McGee, 1980; Struffolino & Bernardi, in press).

In “risk” or “uncertain” societies, vulnerability is a growing concern for individuals, political leaders, and academics (Misztal, 2012; Oris et al., 2016; Ranci, 2010). Despite this concern, vulnerability is still vague, multifaceted, and in need of theoretical clarification. In this article, we show that the life course tradition is a heuristic and integrative framework that can be applied to understand the processes that lead to vulnerability and allow individuals/groups to overcome it. It also helped us in providing a new dynamic definition of human vulnerability, defined on the basis of four main concepts: resources, stressors, outcomes, and contexts. Using this dynamic framework, we propose a new definition of vulnerability: vulnerability is a lack of resources in one or more life domains, which given a specific context, places individuals or groups at a major risk of experiencing (1) negative consequences related to sources of stress, (2) the inability to cope effectively with stressors, and (3) the inability to recover from the stressor or to take advantage of opportunities before a given deadline. It is based on the idea that a life course is a process that involves gaining and losing resources as well as chronic stress or stress related to critical events or life transitions. This definition of vulnerability can be shared across disciplines, and can open new avenues for future research.

The Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research LIVES Overcoming Vulnerability: Life Course Perspectives (www.lives-nccr.ch) is a long-term interdisciplinary research program. This program aims to advance knowledge on vulnerability by investigating vulnerability processes and social inequalities through the longitudinal lenses of a life-course perspective. This issue presents some theoretical and empirical advances of this research program that is focused on individual life trajectories and vulnerability. The life-course perspective looks for different types of trajectories and supports our decision to describe vulnerability dynamics as multidimensional, multilevel, and multidirectional. Taken together, these elements define a heuristic life course perspective on vulnerability that has the potential to show a broader perspective and include the efforts of many fields. This will help us further understand how individuals and peoples can develop resilience or vulnerability to their experiences and across their life trajectories.

The first article of this issue, by Spini, Bernardi, and Oris, proposes an integrated theoretical framework to study vulnerability. It starts with the aforementioned definition of vulnerability as a dynamic process of stresses and resources. The advantage of this type of definition is that it is compatible with individual models of behavior and risks, as well as with their social patterning across shifting political, economic, and cultural landscapes. Moreover, this article presents a life-course perspective of vulnerability and proposes that vulnerability should be studied as a multidimensional, multilevel, and multidirectional process. Vulnerability takes place at the intersection of different life domains, across different levels (individual, group, and collective), and is contingent to life experiences and trajectories. The following articles illustrate three angles (multidimensionality, multilevel, and multidirectionality) through which vulnerability processes can be approached.

Bernardi, Bollmann, Potarca, and Rossier illustrate the relevance of the multidimensional perspective on vulnerability by analyzing spillover effects across family, work, and leisure trajectories that result from the transition to parenthood. The authors find a sustained decrease in work and leisure well-being in the years following the birth of a first child and note differences across gender and personality types. Their analysis points to the need to examine the way in which resources coming from other life spheres are allocated to adjust to family transitions, as well as the extent to which such allocations are defined by individual or contextual characteristics, which in turn shape differential vulnerabilities.

Widmer and Spini investigate the potentially misleading character of social norms such as gender. The authors show that conformity to certain gender norms (particularly those related to the division of paid and family work) can be counterproductive for many individuals who experience turning points along their lives. One example of this is divorce, which can make mothers who are homemakers or work part-time much more vulnerable.

The last article, by Oris, Gabriel, Ritschard, and Kliegel, analyzes poverty trajectories in old age by using a life-course vulnerability framework. On a conceptual level, they discuss how this framework bridges the social stratification and the biographization models of poverty, as well as how poverty research and life course research can mutually benefit each other. They conclude that difficult early-life conditions are at the beginning of a causal chain that eventually leads to poverty in old age.

Finally, the comments by Ferraro and Schafer first acknowledge that the life-course perspective is “in the midst of a golden age.” They then introduce important issues and questions related to the need to clarify concepts such as vulnerability and disadvantage. They finally propose that we focus on the subjective experience of time to better integrate agency within contexts in the life-course paradigm.

Together, these articles on vulnerability across the life course call for integrating various approaches focusing on the concept of vulnerability. New theoretical tools are needed to address the challenges and complexity in understanding vulnerability and resilience in life trajectories. We propose that using a life-course perspective on vulnerability can be helpful to integrating different perspectives and for describing processes that are complex, systemic, and dynamic. We are confident that the papers in this issue and their multidimensional, multilevel, and multidirectional focuses will provide inspiration for those aiming to study the complexity of vulnerability dynamics from different disciplinary and analytical perspectives. Researchers are encouraged to develop new questions to face these challenges in crossing and articulating the different research directions that we sketch here.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The authors thank Annahita Ehsan for revising the English in the last version of this article.

FUNDING

This publication benefited from the support of the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research LIVES – Overcoming Vulnerability: Life Course Perspectives, financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation. The authors are grateful to the Swiss National Science Foundation for providing financial assistance.

Additional information

Funding

This publication benefited from the support of the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research LIVES – Overcoming Vulnerability: Life Course Perspectives, financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation. The authors are grateful to the Swiss National Science Foundation for providing financial assistance.