Coping in Times of Crisis: Social and Cultural Dimensions

Research on coping in times of crisis has increasingly highlighted the need to understand adversity, not merely as an individual psychological experience but as a socially and culturally embedded process. Crises such as war, pandemics, forced migration, economic instability, and natural disasters disrupt established social norms, collective identities, and frameworks of meaning. Studies show that individuals and communities draw upon culturally patterned resources, shared narratives, and social structures to interpret events and navigate uncertainty. These processes reveal significant variation across societies and social groups, demonstrating that coping is shaped by cultural repertoires, power relations, and structural inequalities. Situating coping within its broader sociocultural context enables a more comprehensive understanding of resilience, vulnerability, and social change during periods of disruption.

This Research Topic seeks to address the need for deeper sociological inquiry into how culture and social structures shape coping during crises. While existing scholarship has illuminated the psychological dimensions of coping, less attention has been paid to the cultural symbols, collective narratives, institutional arrangements, and structural constraints that influence how individuals and groups respond to disruption. The goal is to advance a comparative, culturally informed sociological perspective that accounts for both meaning-making processes and inequalities in access to coping resources. Recent advances in qualitative and mixed-methods research, as well as cross-cultural studies, provide new opportunities to examine coping as a dynamic social process.

The scope of the Research Topic encompasses themes such as cultural repertoires of coping; collective identity and crisis; the role of institutions and social support networks; structural inequalities shaping coping trajectories; religion, spirituality, and secular meaning-making; and the sociological implications of protracted crises. We welcome theoretical contributions, empirical studies, comparative analyses, methodological papers, and integrative reviews.