Umeå universitets logga

 This study focuses on young adults with disabilities and their pathways towards work and family in past society. The aim is to explore their life trajectories and compare them to a non-disabled group of people who experienced the same time-space context, represented by the 19th-century Sundsvall region, Sweden. We employ sequence analyses on a series of demographic events that were to occur in the life of young adults: first occupation, marriage and parenthood. We also check for the events of death and out-migration. Disability studies show that disabled people were often subject to stigmatization caused by their impairment and prevailing perceptions about normalcy in in society. This would have limited their opportunities of work and family compared to non-disabled persons. Individual-level data consisting of parish registers digitized by the Demographic Data Base (DDB), Umeå University, Sweden, allow sequence analysis that helps to answer the questions of whether and how disability influenced people’s life trajectories. We obtain a holistic picture of how their life developed that suggests that disability substantially limited people’s opportunities to find job, marry and form a family. This indicates that a stigma was associated with disability beyond the impairment itself and worked to add to disabled individuals’ difficulties in both the labor market and marriage market.