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METHODS article

Front. Sociol.
Sec. Medical Sociology
Volume 9 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2024.1495009
This article is part of the Research Topic The Cost of War: Sociological Approaches to the Societal and Individual Wounds of Combat View all 7 articles

Predisposed Vulnerabilities and Survival among the Finnish Soldiers of World War II: Historical Life Course Approach

Provisionally accepted
Ville Kivimäki Ville Kivimäki 1,2*Virva Liski Virva Liski 1Ilari Taskinen Ilari Taskinen 1
  • 1 Tampere University, Tampere, Pirkanmaa, Finland
  • 2 Finnish Literature Society, Helsinki, Finland

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    In this methodological paper we propose a historical life course approach to analyze soldiers’ predispositions to experience war-related violence and stress and to respond to it. We argue that a closer quantitative inspection of pre-war and wartime factors will help to understand the various causes leading to different exposures to stress and violence during the war, which have consequently had different outcomes for the war survivors’ later lives. Our methodology is designed for a rich data source, the Finnish Army in World War II Database (FA2W, N=4253), but is generally also applicable to other case studies. We will demonstrate in practice how we apply the historical life course approach to the study of soldiers’ pre-war background variables, wartime service paths, and measurable war stress exposures. In the final discussion, as one potential follow-up to our proposal, we will point to an advanced historical analysis of community-building and meaning-making linked to different war experience profiles combining the quantitative social historical methodology with a qualitative cultural history approach.

    Keywords: Finland, History, life course approach, methodology, Mortality, Soldiers, war stress, World War II

    Received: 11 Sep 2024; Accepted: 13 Dec 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Kivimäki, Liski and Taskinen. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Ville Kivimäki, Tampere University, Tampere, 33100, Pirkanmaa, Finland

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