Unpacking vulnerability: towards language that advances understanding and resolution of social inequities in public health
Abstract
Our attention was drawn to an important recent paper published in the journal Critical Public Health, which discusses
the use (and misuse) of the word “vulnerable” in public health
research and practice (Katz, Hardy, Firestone, Lofters, &
Morton-Ninomiya, 2019). We commend these authors for
contributing a timely paper that calls attention to the role of
language in what we regard as the longstanding challenge of
downstream drift in public health research (e.g., Baum &
Fisher, 2014; Baum & Sanders, 2011; Carey, Malbon,
Crammond, Pescud, & Baker, 2016).
The paper caught our eye, in part, because the authors went
about their task by identifying and analyzing recent articles published in the Canadian Journal of Public Health (CJPH), as well
as the American Journal of Public Health, that had used the word
“vulnerable” in a way that was “vaguely, inconsistently or undefined at least once.” T