In the wake of welfare policy rollouts, a research imperative emerged to approach the impact of the phenomenon and austerity policies on individuals and societies. With this came a drive to discover a potentially new structure of inequality. A number of studies have focused on the gendered impact of recession (McKay et al 2013; Harrison, 2013; Spitzer and Piper, 2014, Treanor 2015; O’Loughlin et al 2015). The greatest impact of public sector cuts is inevitably waged on women: as single parents, public sector workers and greater users of public services (McKay (et al 2013). Harrison’s (2013) qualitative study on the impact of economic decline in the Sussex town of Newhaven critiques the focus by academics and policy professionals on ‘resilience’ with regard to recession, which stimatisatises the vulnerable and obscures structural factors. In interviews, female exercise of ‘resilience’ is seen to levy declining health, assets, and be unsustainable. Treanor’s study (2015) takes a longitudinal view of financial vulnerability (studying 5217 children born in Scotland in 2004–2005) to show young children are adversely affected by their mothers’ emotional distress rather than direct economic effects. O’Loughlin et al’s study (2015) takes a cross-national, cross disciplinary focus, to explore the effects of austerity on European men, which he says is experienced as a ‘rites of passage’ in which male identity can be a coping resource. The study finds commonality across differing demographic and socioeconomic backgrounded individuals in the areas of identity, expectations and aspirations. A gap emerges in the literature in terms of exploration of how recession is comparatively coped with between the genders.

A number of researchers have returned to previous studies in view of recession. Atkinson’s study (2013) returns to his 2010–11- intensive qualitative work with 29 families in Bristol. His findings undermine the class-leveling, gendered argument made by O’Loughlin et al’s study. Instead he finds how individuals understanding of recession is determined by a combination of class and occupational resources which render the future as – controllable, uncontrollable, precarious, or reasonably controllable. Leicht and Fitzgerald (2014) expanded their 2007 study of over-55 Americans Post-Industrial Peasants in light of the crash. They find that at a time of increased low income and job security for this group, the ‘work until I die’ ethos rises because of the unaffordability of retirement. In this they see neoliberal/neoconservative thinking has effectively ‘defined old age out of existence’ under the pretence of free market choice.