The paper is intended as an exemplary study of QLR from the analysis of labour markets' insecurity and its ramifications for social uncertainty in a life course perspective and labor trajectories analysis. The objective is the study of cumulative risks over the life course and life events associated with job insecurities in a comparative analysis, looking at different welfare regimes in Latin America.
The paper addresses the question of how institutional arrangements, the heterogeneity of occupational careers and individual life course, shape the experience of job insecurities as well as the impact of labor insecurity on the life course and workers responses to handle such kinds of social risks, in different institutional contexts.
The purpose is to discuss the objective and subjective determinants of insecurity experiences over the time, specially the link between conditions and perceptions of insecurity during labor trajectories: how workers value security at work depending on life course stage and changing structural conditions over the time? The analysis is based on a qualitative study of conditions and impacts of insecurities trajectories in different welfare regimes. Specifically, it discuss how political economy interacts with occupational careers' heterogeneity and life course stage to constrain or allow safety labor trajectories.
Our comparative analyses include two Latin American countries from two different classical welfare regimes: Argentina, which represents a “liberal regime” and Mexico, as an example of a “family- oriented regime.” The methodology to be adopted in this paper includes qualitative cohorts analyses in order to deal with each of the specific objectives. Since sixty “in-depth interviews”, ethnographic-based work and reconstruct work trajectories in their multiple dimensions, this primary sources of qualitative data enable us to generate information for the purpose of constructing trajectories’ typologies. This technique enables the identification and meaning of temporal change in work insecurity across workers and exploration of how people interpret and respond to such change in the labor world.
Life course analyses would be the most appropriate tool for processing information from this type of data source and discuss the boundaries of the methods employed to address the typologies trajectories’ presented (qualitative cohort analysis, kind of events, duration of events, duration of trajectories, controls of reliability and validity, comparability over the time, data source, the technique to pick up and codify qualitative longitudinal information, etc.).