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