To empirically analyze the dynamics of social exclusion, one needs to follow the same individuals over time, if exclusion over the life course is in focus, or to have repeated observations over time if the interest concerns general changes or trends in the social exclusion occurrence. Since access to this kind of data has been scarce until recent years, a large part of the literature on social exclusion deals with static analyses at a specific point in time. Another problem is that there may be difficulties when obtaining and handling data with phenomena at both the macro and micro levels. To be more precise, it is problematic to identify and analyze social change at the macro level since it could be related to or caused by social exclusion at the micro level. One also needs to be aware of the possible time lag between cause and effect.
In this article, we use data that span over slightly more than two decades.
However, to be able to conduct an analysis that covers the whole life course, we would need observations from a longer period of time. At the same time, since we have included an employment variable as a social exclusion indicator in this article, we restrict our analysis to those individuals who are of “workforce age”. Therefore, our analysis basically traces the middle part of the life course. Moreover, when analyzing social exclusion over the life course, a distinction can be made between the exclusion over and of the life course. While in this thesis we more closely touch on social exclusion over the life course, social exclusion of the life course concerns relationships between the state, family and market that may generate exclusion for certain groups.
