Different sized belts: family strategies against financial shocks

When faced with financial shocks families often combine multiple resources, including savings, networks, public transfers and services, to cover their needs and respond to changing conditions. This paper explores the strategies families with children in Barcelona deploy to respond to financial shocks by analysing interviews with 29 families experiencing difficulties to make ends meet. The paper makes three main contributions to the literature on responses to shocks. First, it provides novel evidence on how and to what extent families strategies are shaped by their past trajectories and resources. Second, it introduces a novel technique, event interviews, specifically designed to study family responses to events and identify the resources (both public and private) they rely on. Third, by contrasting the experiences of families with diverse resources, the paper seeks to illuminate some of the mechanisms through which structural constraints shape coping strategies and thus, agency. Understanding family strategies is particularly relevant in the current context framed by the aftermath of the COVID pandemic and the recent increases in energy, food and housing prices which affected the most disadvantaged the most.