Financial Preparedness for Emergencies: Age Patterns and Multilevel Vulnerabilities

Abstract

Guided mainly by the social vulnerability perspective and life course perspective, this study examined age patterns of financial preparedness for emergencies and how they were contextualized by vulnerabilities at the individual and community levels. We matched data from the Federal Emergency Management Agency 2018 National Household Survey and 15 indicators of the Social Vulnerability Index at the county level. Two-level logistic regressions were conducted with the working sample, which included 4,623 respondents from 958 counties. The results showed that adults aged 18 to 44 were more likely than those aged 65 to 74 to set aside money for emergencies among Hispanics, those with minor children in the household, and in communities with higher levels of poverty, higher percentages of minorities, and higher percentages of no vehicles, but less likely to do so among the White and those with insurance. The findings were discussed within a multilevel layered vulnerability framework.

Health and Mental Health Impact of Tornadoes: Are Older Adults More Resilient?

“…Recently, the social vulnerability approach has highlighted intersectionality, which is sometimes termed layered vulnerability, and directs attention to the intertwining of different vulnerability characteristics such as age, gender, and racial differences (Bolin and Kurtz 2018;Campbell 2019;Tierney 2019). Some studies have specifically examined the layered vulnerability perspective, focusing on the interaction of old age with other vulnerabilities, sometimes from a multilevel perspective (Adams, Eisenman, and Glik 2019;Cong and Feng 2022). The empirical findings of this study provide further evidence of complicated interactions among these factors.…”