When Vulnerabilities Stack Up, Social Services Fail Everyone Equally, Finnish Study Finds

One of the most cherished promises of the Nordic welfare state is that help arrives when you need it, regardless of who you are or where you were born. A new study from Finland now puts that promise under a statistical microscope, and the results are both reassuring and deeply unsettling. Reassuring, because when researchers compared migrants and Finnish-born citizens facing the same hardships, they found no significant difference in how likely each group was to be failed by the social service system. Unsettling, because those failures were startlingly common, and they stacked up with brutal mathematical precision: the more vulnerabilities a person carried, the more likely they were to report that services they needed were unavailable, inadequate, or simply too slow to arrive.

The study, led by Katri Kantojärvi and colleagues at the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare (THL), was published in the International Journal for Equity in Health. Its central question is deceptively simple: who falls through the cracks of a welfare system famous for its generosity? While the barriers migrants face in accessing healthcare have been studied extensively across Europe, social services, income support, housing assistance, child welfare, care for older adults and people with disabilities, have remained a striking blind spot in the research literature. Yet these are precisely the services that people in crisis depend on most, and delays in accessing them can cascade into homelessness, debt, and deteriorating mental health.

To answer the question, the team turned to two nationally representative cross-sectional surveys. The first, MoniSuomi, surveyed 1,384 foreign-born adults living in Finland and was specifically designed to capture the experiences of the migrant population, with data collection sensitive to linguistic and cultural diversity. The second, the Healthy Finland survey, covered 1,221 individuals of Finnish origin and provided the comparison group. Crucially, the researchers restricted their analysis to respondents who had actually used social services within the previous twelve months, ensuring that the findings reflect the experiences of people who had genuine contact with the system rather than speculative opinions about it.

The methodological heart of the study lies in its treatment of vulnerability. Rather than treating disadvantage as a single variable, the researchers measured six distinct indicators: unemployment, financial stress, psychological distress assessed with the Mental Health Inventory-5, severe functional limitation, poor social inclusion measured with the Experiences of Social Inclusion Scale, and low digital skills. Each indicator captures a different dimension of precarity, and each was examined both individually and in combination. The outcomes were equally concrete: whether respondents perceived unmet service needs, and whether they perceived delays in gaining access to services. Survey-weighted logistic regression models produced odds ratios with confidence intervals, and interaction terms were used to formally test whether the effects of vulnerability differed between migrant-origin and Finnish-origin respondents.

The results paint a coherent and sobering picture. Four of the six vulnerability indicators, poor social inclusion, psychological distress, financial stress, and severe functional limitations, were strongly associated with both unmet needs and perceived delayed access, and they did so in both populations. A person who was socially isolated, mentally strained, financially squeezed, or physically limited was substantially more likely to say that the system had not delivered what they needed, or had delivered it too late. Unemployment and low digital skills showed weaker or less consistent associations, a finding that itself carries a technical lesson: not all forms of disadvantage translate equally into service system failures, and the mechanisms linking hardship to unmet need are likely to be specific rather than generic.

The most striking result, however, is what the researchers did not find. When migrant-origin and Finnish-origin individuals were exposed to the same vulnerabilities, there were no statistically significant differences between the groups in their reports of unmet needs or delays. In other words, the much-feared migrant penalty in social service access did not emerge once vulnerability profiles were held constant. This is a finding with real political weight in a European debate often framed around migration as a special burden on welfare systems. The Finnish data suggest that the system does not discriminate by origin in this domain; what it fails at, it fails at for everyone.

But the absence of an origin effect is only half the story. When the researchers aggregated the six indicators into a cumulative vulnerability score, the picture changed dramatically. Individuals carrying multiple vulnerabilities were substantially more likely to report both unmet needs and delays, and the sum score model explained more variance than any individual predictor, particularly for unmet needs. The researchers also compared model fit using the Akaike Information Criterion, a standard statistical measure that penalizes model complexity, and found that the cumulative models performed better than models built on single vulnerabilities. This is a textbook demonstration of what social epidemiologists call cumulative disadvantage: risks do not merely add together, they compound, creating service needs that are complex, intersecting, and poorly served by systems organized around single problems.

The mechanism behind this compounding is not hard to imagine. A person facing unemployment alone may navigate the benefit system without much trouble. Add financial stress, and the stakes of any administrative error rise. Add psychological distress, and the cognitive bandwidth available for filling out forms, attending appointments, and appealing decisions shrinks. Add social isolation, and there is no one to help interpret a letter, make a phone call, or advocate on the person’s behalf. Add low digital skills to a system that increasingly routes access through online portals, and the barriers multiply. Each vulnerability is manageable in isolation; together, they can overwhelm both the individual and a service architecture designed for simpler cases.

The policy implications follow directly from the data. The authors argue that service models must be inclusive in a specific, structural sense: they must recognize and respond to complex vulnerability profiles rather than treating each hardship as a separate case for a separate office. They recommend simplifying service pathways, reducing the number of doors a person in crisis must knock on, and investing in proactive outreach, actively identifying and contacting individuals facing multiple disadvantages rather than waiting for them to navigate the system unaided. In an era when welfare agencies across Europe are digitizing their interfaces, the finding that digital skills matter less than social connection and mental health is a useful corrective: technology can streamline access for the capable, but it cannot substitute for human contact with those least able to demand it.

There are, as with any cross-sectional study, limits to what can be concluded. Perceived unmet needs and delays are self-reported, and perception is shaped by expectations as much as by objective service quality; the study measures how the system feels to those inside it, which is a legitimate and important outcome, but not identical to administrative measures of waiting times or benefit denials. Because the data capture a single point in time, causality runs in both directions: psychological distress may make services harder to access, and inaccessible services may deepen distress. Still, the consistency of the pattern across two independent, nationally representative surveys, and across two population groups with very different histories of arrival in Finland, gives the central conclusion considerable weight. In the Nordic welfare state, the study suggests, the fault line of inequity does not run between natives and migrants. It runs between those carrying a single burden and those carrying many, and it is the accumulation of hardship, not the passport in a person’s pocket, that determines whether help arrives in time.

Subject of Research: Cumulative vulnerability and inequitable access to social services among migrant-origin and Finnish-born populations in Finland

Article Title: Cumulative vulnerabilities increase perceived unmet needs and delays in access to social services in migrant origin and Finnish-born populations

Article References: Kantojärvi, K., García-Velázquez, R., Mäki-Opas, J., Kuusio, H., & Skogberg, N. (2026). Cumulative vulnerabilities increase perceived unmet needs and delays in access to social services in migrant origin and Finnish-born populations. International Journal for Equity in Health. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12939-026-03040-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12939-026-03040-5

Keywords: social services, health equity, migrant health, cumulative vulnerability, Finland, welfare state, unmet needs, service access delays, social inclusion, psychological distress, digital skills, survey research