Young individuals as microcosms of the Portuguese crisis

ABSTRACT

The Portuguese crisis affected the country’s collective identity, and ‘the timing of life’ at which it struck individual lives in this case is also significant. Quantitative figures show that young people were particularly affected by this crisis. However, a long-run qualitative approach provides a multilayered and quite complex view of what this crisis is embedding in young people’s lives and minds. In qualitative research on ‘middle class’ transitions to adulthood carried out in 2009, 52 young adults were interviewed about their educational, residential, occupational and romantic lives. In a follow-up study, these individuals’ trajectories, plans and expectations are now updated; their past and present confronted; and effects of the crisis on their lives questioned. The discussion is held in the form of a critical approach to the theories of individualisation, and goes to the heart of the ‘generation in itself’ vs. ‘generation for itself’ and ‘biographies of choice’ vs. ‘discourses of choice’ debates.

KEYWORDS:

• Crisis
• follow-up
• life course research
• Portugal
• trajectories
• young people

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributors

Magda is a sociologist specialising in Youth, Social Trajectories and Life Course Research and Methods. She is a researcher at CIES-IUL and an active member of the Pool of European Youth Researchers of the EU-CoE Youth Partnership. She is currently developing a follow-up study with young people interviewed before the Portuguese crisis. Some of her most relevant chapters on these topics are ‘Young people of the “Austere Period”: Mechanisms and effects of inequality over time in Portugal’ (with Nuno de Almeida Alves, by Palgrave Macmillan) and ‘Beyond “Biographical” and “Cultural Illusions”: European Youth Studies: Temporality and Critical Youth Studies’, by Brill.

Notes

1. Explained in the script as ‘your own responsibility, choices, merit or fault’ in a category called ‘your own choices’.

2. Explained in the script as ‘events or circumstances of those closest to you’ in a category called ‘family and friends’.

3. Explained in the script as ‘your social and financial situation: expenses, difficulties, work stability, etc’. In a category called ‘social and economic situation’.

4. Explained in the script as something out of their control, attributed to change, to luck, good or bad.

5. No higher education, or less than that.

6. Equal to or less than the Minimum Wage plus 200 euros.

7. For example, not reporting a pregnancy, a promotion, etc.

8. Given that this a follow-up study, it is also possible that the interviewees were affected by the social desirability that tends to contaminate qualitative interviews. In this specific case, this may even have been exacerbated by an unconscious need on the part of interviewees to show how life had improved, or at least that the positive elements were more significant that the negative ones.

9. The measures taken at the urging of the Troika proved difficult to measure the ‘deepening of the current brain drain, especially among young people, with its vicious-circle-type amplifying effects on declining competitiveness’ (Graça et al., 2011).

10. Translated title of the former Portuguese Prime-Minister’s autobiography.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, under grants SFRH/BD/27314/2006 and SFRH/BPD/76580/2011.