Vulnerability to Negative Life Events: Unemployment and Loss of a Spouse in Japan

The purposes of this study are to introduce the idea of a vulnerability score for measuring the potential damage from negative life events as socially embedded hazards, and to show analytical examples of this by using the SSM 2015 data, which is Japanese national survey data. In the analysis, we apply the statistical method of causal inference for estimating the degree of vulnerability to negative life events from cross-sectional social survey data and define the vulnerability score as this measurement of vulnerability. We analyze the SSM survey data to assess people's vulnerability in terms of household income and subjective well-being in response to negative life events, such as unemployment and loss of a spouse, and reveal differences based on gender, age, and educational attainment. As for unemployment, we find from the analyses that both men and women who are around 40 years old and has less education face the most severe risk of damaging household income, while younger men are at severe risk of damaging their subjective well-being through the event. As for loss of a spouse, we found that women are more vulnerable than men in terms of objective well-being, while men are more vulnerable than women in terms of subjective well-being.