External Colloquium: Bram Vanhoutte (University of Manchester)

Bram Vanhoutte (University of Manchester): The Road to Resilience: A comparative life course study

Ageing can be associated with losses in health, partnership and wealth, but some people manage to limit the impact of these events on their well-being substantially. In a context of population ageing with scarce public resources, the issue of coping with adverse aspects of ageing becomes even more important. To explore these issues, I will use innovative theoretical insights into the nature of resilience and a mixed methods approach. This will incorporate a combination of comparative longitudinal data from England (the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing) and the USA (the Health and Retirement Study) and qualitative in-depth interviews with older residents of Manchester who have experienced adverse events. The study will create insight into novel ways of maintaining well-being, through the study of the four distinct phases of the causal impact chain. Outcomes of the project will highlight new ways of maintaining well-being in the face of adversity, by examining material and life-course resources mobilized to foster successful ageing. The project focuses on vulnerability, adverse events and resilience.

Bram Vanhoutte is a Research Fellow in Sociology at the University of Manchester, affiliated with the Manchester Institute for Collaborative Research on Ageing (MICRA) and Cathie Marsh Institute for Social Research (CMI). He holds a Master’s degree in Sociology (Free University of Brussels, 2004) and in Economics (University of Ghent, 2005), and wasawarded his PhD in the Social Sciences in 2012 (University of Leuven).