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This paper aims to contribute to the growing literature on resilience by focusing on coping with hardship during the Great Recession, drawing upon primary data gathered through household and key informant interviews in nine European countries. As the resilience approach highlights agency, the paper examines the nature of household responses to hardship during this period on the basis of the 'structure-agency problem'. An important contribution of this paper is to identify different forms of agency and discuss their implications. More specifically, we conceptualise three different types of agency in coping with hardship: absorptive, adaptive and transformative. Analysis of the findings indicates that structural constraints remain prominent. Most coping mechanisms fall under the category of absorptive and adaptive agency characterised here as burden-bearing actions that 'conform' to changing circumstances rather than shaping those circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research has shown that divorce reduces the likelihood of home-ownership. Even in later life, ever-divorced men and women display lower home-ownership rates than their married counterparts. There is, however, a lack of knowledge about the consequences of divorce for a majority of divorcees: those who remain in home-ownership or move back into home-ownership after an episode in rental housing. This paper investigates the economic costs of divorce by focusing on the housing wealth of ever-divorced home-owners in later life (age 50 and over), against the background of changing welfare and housing regimes. The empirical analysis is based on data from ten European countries that participated in the third and fourth waves of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE 2007/8 and 2011/2). Our analyses support an association between divorce experience and lower housing wealth holdings for men and women who remain in home-ownership after a divorce, or re-enter home-ownership after a spell in rental housing. This means that a divorce has negative housing consequences for a broader range of individuals than thus far assumed. In countries with a dynamic housing market and a deregulated housing finance system, ever-divorced home-owners are worse off than their married counterparts. In these countries, more elderly individuals with a weaker financial situation are able to remain in or regain access to (mortgaged) home-ownership, but at the cost of lower housing equity. Further research should focus on the implications (e.g. for wellbeing, economic position) of such cross-country variations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]