History and the life course: Combat, disability, and work

Sociologists have long recognized that historical events, such as wars, depressions, and natural disasters, can affect the trajectories of people’s lives and can, more broadly, alter social structure. The following paper examines the effect of a particular type of event, war, on a particular facet of people’s lives, their ability to work. The paper uses longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to test three competing accounts regarding the effect of wars on veterans’ lives. The traumatic stress account sees wars as having uniformly negative effects on all service-members who are exposed to combat. The cumulative disadvantage account suggests that combat positively or at least neutrally affects people with greater pre-war status, while negatively affecting those with lower pre-war status. The turning point account suggests the reverse: wars negatively affect those with greater pre-war status, while improving the lot of those with lower pre-war status. The evidence suggests that, with regard to disability and unemployment, the effects of combat are most consistent with the theory of cumulative disadvantage.