ABSTRACT
This chapter adopts a life course perspective to study poverty and economic insecurity. First, it explains the advantages of a life course perspective for the study of poverty and gives a historical overview of the field. Next, we discuss two specific life course perspectives that may illuminate the longitudinal patterns and experiences of poverty: the mechanism of cumulative advantage and disadvantage and the resources and stress framework. Third, we discuss the multidimensional aspects of poverty in the life course, conceptualising social exclusion as a multidimensional longitudinal phenomenon. We introduce the idea of spill-over (across the life course, the experience of poverty can spill over to other life domains) and show how the relationship between objective poverty and subjective perceptions of scarcity influences people’s life conditions.
