Connecting life course and vulnerability terminologies

course perspective, a correspondence between the terminology of both fields has to be set up. I start this Section by introducing the terminology I will use for setting up the model. As the study of human vulnerability concerns researchers but also social policy actors and social workers, I pay attention that the terms I use have a consistent meaning between their common usage and the conceptual definition required by research rigor. In connection with vulnerability, I focus on the terms system, outcome, stressor,resource, exposure, sensitivity andresilience. In connection with the life course perspective, I focus on the terms event, state, trajectory, andcontext. Then, I introduce the termfactor of vulnerabilitythat is in-tended to connect the stressor-resource couple to the exposure-sensitivity-resilience treble. Factors of vulnerability constitute the building blocks of my definition of vulnerability in life courses. In the model, vulnerability can distinguish between latent vulnerability and manifest vulnerability. This distinction is made by the current context of observation, all resources remained equal for the system. This distinction is mainly conceptual and has no practical implication from an analyt-ical perspective. The proposed conceptual model of vulnerability to a life course outcome (VLCO-1), is represented in Figure3.2.

The term life course inherently refers to the life course of human beings.

Therefore, in the context of life course studies, the system of the vulnerability framework refers to human beings. The system can refer to individuals taken independently or to some groups of individuals taken together such as couples or families. In this sense, the system refers to the unit of analysis. When it comes to assessing the vulnerability of a system, the system can be reduced to a set of

3.1. A modelisation of vulnerability in life courses 73

resources that is subject to experience some stressors.

From a life course perspective, the system is anchored in temporal and envi-ronmental dimensions. Considering the temporal dimension, I take into account in the VLCO-1 model the three temporal dimensions reported in Section 2.1.1.2:

historical time, social time and individual time. Considering the environmental dimension, I take into account both the social spheres and the geographical lo-calization reported in Section 2.1.1.3. I refer to all these multiple components to the termcontext that I borrow to Delor and Hubert (2000) and Spini et al. (2013, 2017). From a life course perspective, I postulate that the dimensions of the context cited above can take part in the vulnerability of a system as either (c1) contextual resources or (c2) contextual resource-stressor moderators. Firstly (c1), contextual resources refer to elements belonging to the context of a system that the system can mobilize to manage its vulnerability. Contextual resources refer for example to social policies available to the system. They also refer to spatial resources in relation with the geographical location of the system, such as the urban-rural clas-sification of the city of residence, the ambient air pollution of the area of residence, or the type of neighborhood of the place of residence. In the perspective of inte-grating both fields of vulnerability and the life course approach, I do not see any reason to distinguish contextual resources from system’s internal resources: they both provide the system with some capabilities to manage vulnerability.

However, unlike internal resources, a difference is that contextual resources are not affected by stressors experienced by the system. Secondly (c2), contextual resource-stressor moderators refers to contextual elements that change the role of a particular resource or the consequences of a particular stressor on the outcome.

For example, the individual time is a moderator of the resource “bearing a first child”: bearing a first child at age 15, 25, or 50 may change the role of this resource on the outcome.

I define resources as trajectories. Resources refer both to the internal life course trajectories the system is composed of (internal resources) as well as external trajectories that are available to the system (contextual resources). When resources are related to the outcome variable, they can be called symptoms. When the unit of analysis is the individual, resources refer to individual trajectories including biological trajectories such as age, sex, or physical health, psychological trajectories such as well-being, stress, or psychological health, and socioeconomics trajectories such as family and employment. Furthermore, some roles do not change over time.

This is, for example, the case of the resources “Country of origin” and, to some extent, “Sex”. I refer to these resources asstationary trajectories. This distinction between a regular trajectory and a stationary trajectory has a technical implication.

As discussed in Section 3.4, storing the data associated with a regular trajectory is much complex than storing the data associated with a stationary trajectory.

By defining resources as trajectories, I define a level of the resource as a particular state of the trajectory. That means that eachstateof a trajectory refers to a particular level of the resource.

Table 3.2 – Concept dictionary of the model of vulnerability and vulnerabi-lization in life courses. The concepts belong to the vulnerability domain and are linked to a concept that represent them within the life course perspective set of concepts in columnRepresentation. ColumnExample(s)gives an illustration considering vulnerability to povery. The illustration is based on the example used in Section6.2

Concept Description Representation Example(s)

System A set of resources. The unit of analysis. An individual.

Resource

Any item the sytem can mo-bilize to manage its

Outcome A particular state of a par-ticular internal resource.

A particular role on a particular trajectory.

Poverty, formalize for ex-ample by the state “x <

c” on trajectory “Total

The set of the current levels of the resources involved in

pro-cess that A social science theory.

The critical period least one change in its pos-sible states, possibly com-bined with an interaction ef-fect with one or more stres-sors, involve a change on one or more vulnerability interac-tion effect with one or more stressors, involve a change

3.1. A modelisation of vulnerability in life courses 75 I define stressors as life events. Following Spini et al. (2013, 2017), I refer to a stressor as either (1) major or critical life events that produce observable and objectively reportable life changes, (2) chronic strain (recurrent events), or (3) minor events arising out of day-to-day living with no necessary systematic repetition. Since life courses are long-term processes, it is worth mentioning that the effect of a stressor may not be immediately visible. As the critical period hypothesis postulates, stressors consequences may become visible in later life.

I define vulnerability outcomes as states. In this context a state refers to a particular class of a particular variable. When performing sequence analysis, a state refers to an element of the sequence alphabet. Although from a technical point of view an outcome can be any state, it is expected from a substantive point of view that an outcome is an undesired state. It would also be possible to define outcomes as the life events associated with the emergence of each particular outcome. For example, when studying employment status, the associated vulnerability outcome could be referred either as the state “being unemployed” or the life event “losing job”.

However, as an outcome refers to a state an individual may fall in, and if so, try to move out, it is more appropriate to refer to the outcome as the state itself than as the corresponding event. In addition, as Almeida (2005) and Spini et al.

(2013) note, an outcome can be itself a resource for another outcome at a different time. As resources are defined as trajectories in this model, it is appropriate and consistent to define an outcome as a state within a trajectory.