Youth Unemployment And Social Exclusion

This important new book presents the findings of the first comparative study of unemployed youth in Europe using a large and original data set. It addresses some of the key questions around the issue including: How do young people cope with unemployment? Does unemployment lead to social exclusion of young people, implying a withdrawal from society, financial deprivation and social isolation? Drawing on a research sample of over 17000 young unemployed people in ten European countries, the book examines how different welfare strategies and labour market policies in different countries influence the risk of social exclusion among unemployed youth.

EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. Policymakers throughout Europe are enacting policies to support youth labour market integration. However, many young people continue to face unemployment, job insecurity, and the subsequent consequences. Adopting a mixed-method and multilevel perspective, this book provides a comprehensive investigation into the multifaceted consequences of social exclusion. Drawing on rich pan-European comparative and quantitative data, and interviews with young people from across Europe, this text gives a platform to the unheard voices of young people. Contributors derive crucial new policy recommendations and offer fresh insights into areas including youth well-being, health, poverty, leaving the parental home, and qualifying for social security.

In this volume, the European research project YUSEDER ("Youth Unemployment and Social Exclusion: Dimensions, Subjective Experiences and Institutional Responses in Six Countries of the EU"), supported by the EU Commission (Directorate General Research) as a part of the programme Targeted Socio-Economic Research (TSER), addresses the question of what effects long-term unemployment has on young people in regard of their feeling of belonging to society. Does long-term unemployment imply the risk of social exclusion for young people? How does social exclusion develop, and which factors counteract the processes of exclusion? Thus far, research into unemployment has seldom performed comparative studies. This interdisciplinary project in six European countries has conducted for the first time a qualitative study with 300 long-term unemployment young people from age 20 to 25. The inquiry was carried out in the three northern European countries Sweden, Belgium and Germany and in the three southern European countries Greece, Italy and Spain. Researches from psychology, sociology, public health and psychiatry participated in this research project coordinated by Thomas Kieselbach (University of Bremen, Germany). The volumes in the series published up to now within the YUSEDER project represent a state of the art overview of the topic of youth unemployment and health (volume 1) and youth unemployment and social exclusion (volume 2) in the six participating countries. This third volume focuses on the personal experiences and assessments of young people affected by unemployment. Besides presenting the country-specific manifestations of social exclusion, this new study identifies those important key mechanisms which increase (vulnerability factors) or reduce (protective factors) the risk of social exclusion. The results of this interdisciplinary comparative study represent an important basis for conceptualising future intervention measures in the European Union which could redu

This book confronts readers with questions emerging from the 'gap' between EU aspirations to reduce youth unemployment without increasing social exclusion - and what is actually happening in practice. Aimed at a diverse readership, it is based on a three year European Union (EU) project into education, training, guidance and employment (ETG) programmes for young adults across six countries. Insights are grounded in the lives and stories of disadvantaged young adults, and of those who work with them, bringing to life unintended impacts of well intended interventions. The authors consider the influence of shifting political and pedagogical ideologies in the EU on local practices and young peoples’ lives and choices. They also consider the impact of policy and performance management discourses ’on the ground’. This work uses rigorous yet innovative narrative forms to invite readers into a ’whole system’ inquiry into these complexities. Unemployed Youth and Social Exclusion in Europe will make an important contribution to reflecting critically on current policy and practice, as well as to academic understandings of unemployed youth, and restrictive and reflexive approaches to learning for inclusion across Europe.

This volume draws attention to the concept of social exclusion in the context of unemployment as well as to vulnerable groups of young unemployed people with regard to social exclusion in six European countries. It is based upon the results of an international research project (Youth Unemployment an Social Exclusion: Dimensions, Subjective Experiences, and Innovative Institutional Responses in Six Countries of the EU) (YUSEDER) conducted in the framework of the research programme Targeted Socio-Economic Research (TSER) of the European Commission. Partners from six European countries with differing scientific backgrounds (health psychology, public health research, psychatry, industrial sociology, medical sociology) from six European countries participated in this project. The concept of social exclusion has gained an impressive importance in the European policy debate. The refused entry to the labor market for members of the younger generation increases the risk of social exclusion for the affected youth as well as for the social fabric in general. The contributions of this volume illustrate an initial approach to analysing and comparing theoretical reflections about the meaning and extent of social exclusion for young unemployed people from a comparative perspective. The research has been carried out in three Northern European countries (Sweden, Germany, Belgium) an three Southern European Countries (Spain, Italy, Greece). For each country a specific national report ist presented. The comparative section describes and attempts to explain the similarities and dissimilarities between countries having rather diverse histrorical and social understandings of being socially excluded or marginalised für young people

Worldwide child and youth poverty remain the biggest barrier to achieving a better life in adulthood. Progress in lifting children out of poverty in the last decades has been slow and limited in the developing world, while the recent global economic crisis has exacerbated child poverty, youth unemployment, and social exclusion in many developed countries. This book critically examines the long-term consequences of growing up poor, the close linkages between deprivation and human rights violations in childhood and adolescence, and their effects on labor market entry and future career in a number of developing and developed countries. Drawing on multiple disciplinary perspectives, it makes a forceful case for the eradication of child poverty to take center stage in the Sustainable Development Goals.

The idea that Britain, the US and other western societies are witnessing the rise of an underclass of people at the bottom of the social heap, structurally and culturally distinct from traditional patterns of `decent' working-class life, has become increasingly popular in the 1990s. Anti-work, anti-social, and welfare dependent cultures are said to typify this new `dangerous class' and `dangerous youth' are taken as the prime subjects of underclass theories. Debates about the family and single-parenthood, about crime and about unemployment and welfare reforms have all become embroiled in underclass theories which, whilst highly controversial, have had remarkable influence on the politics and policies of governments in Britain and the US, Youth, the `Underclass' and Social Exclusion constitutes the first concerted attempt to grapple with the underclass idea in relation to contemporary youth. It focuses upon unemployment, training, the labour market, crime, homelessness, and parenting and will be essential reading for students of social policy, sociology and criminology.