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Disaster and Life Course Processes

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Handbook of the Life Course

Part of the book series: Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research ((HSSR))

Abstract

Disasters exist by virtue of the fact that persons and places are adversely affected by environmental hazards, which raises important questions about the characteristics and origins of differential vulnerability to such hazards in the first place. In this chapter, I consider the import of a life course perspective for studying the differential vulnerability of persons and places to environmental hazards. I also consider the utility of life course perspective for understanding disasters as processes (versus events), which persist in time and desist slowly. I demonstrate these ideas in the context of a stylized model. Implications and avenues for future research on disaster and life course processes are discussed.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The term environmental is used broadly throughout this chapter to cover natural, technological, and man-made events (Guha-Sapir et al. 2013).

    Readers may be struck by the broad scope of this definition; however, this is the definition of disaster used by a number of research and relief organizations in the United States and worldwide, including the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED), Doctors Without Borders, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), the Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance (USAID), and the United Nations (U.N.), to name only a few.

  2. 2.

    CRED further subdivides natural hazards into five groups: geophysical, meteorological, hydrological, climatological, and biological (Guha-Sapir et al. 2013). Others, e.g., Logan and Xu (2011) and Schultz et al. (2007), focus instead on the characteristics of hazards, both natural and technological, with respect to such features as spatial scope, magnitude, duration, etc.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, Minnesota Population Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA

    Jack DeWaard

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA

    Michael J. Shanahan

  2. Life Course Center and Department of Sociology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA

    Jeylan T. Mortimer

  3. Department of Sociology, Washington State University, Pullman, Washington, USA

    Monica Kirkpatrick Johnson

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DeWaard, J. (2016). Disaster and Life Course Processes. In: Shanahan, M., Mortimer, J., Kirkpatrick Johnson, M. (eds) Handbook of the Life Course. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20880-0_14

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