Household Coping Strategies Under Persistent Inflation: An Economic-Sociological Analysis of the Turkish Case

Öz

Sustained high inflation has reshaped everyday economic life for households across Türkiye over the past several years, yet the sociological mechanisms through which households absorb, redistribute, and endure this pressure remain less thoroughly theorized than the macroeconomic drivers of inflation itself. This article develops an economic-sociological account of household coping strategies under persistent inflation, drawing on an integrative review of scholarship published between 2023 and 2026. Building on the concept of social embeddedness, the article argues that household responses to inflation cannot be adequately explained by rational-choice consumption models alone, since a substantial share of adaptive behavior is channeled through informal kinship, neighborhood, and community networks rather than through formal market or state mechanisms. Three coping domains are examined: adjustments to consumption and expenditure patterns, increased reliance on informal solidarity networks, and the erosion of household savings and asset buffers. The review situates the Turkish experience within a comparative international literature on inflation coping while highlighting features distinctive to the Turkish case, including the scale and duration of the current disinflation process and the structural entrenchment of informality as a household risk-management strategy. The article concludes with implications for social policy design and for future household-level economic research in high-inflation contexts.