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Abstract
The transition from school to work has been intensely examined by different disciplines. However, this transition has rarely been examined in relation to the experiences acquired by young people in their free time, from a longitudinal perspective. This article analyses the impact of one type of experience, membership in organisations, in the young people’s pathways of transition. The aims are first to contribute to the theoretical debate on this transition, and secondly to develop tools for analysing quantitative and qualitative data based on an empirical study performed in Catalonia in 2005. The conclusions reached aim to drive not only the academic debate but also the political discussion on a key issue: how to act to improve the most vulnerable pathways.
Acknowledgement
This article is based on a research project granted by the Catalan Youth Agency that was carried out in 2004 and 2005.
Notes
1. The concept of track in the educational system has been hotly debated, especially in the discussion on the unification and diversification of pathways in post‐compulsory education (Hodgson et al., Citation2004).
2. Measuring how many hours people spend on work, family duties and free‐time activities is a controversial issue, with epistemological and methodological difficulties. In France, they have a long tradition of studying this issue since 1960s. In 1962, Dumazedier published Vers une civilisation du loisir (Paris, Seuil), which provoked a great debate on the increasing free time in industrial societies and on the development of the leisure industry, especially for children and youngsters. In post‐industrial societies, the leisure market has been steadily increasing, which means that young people have more time and more money to spend on it.
3. There are no studies specifically focusing on the impact of this involvement in future educational and job pathways, but there is an interesting attempt to measure this impact on the general transition to adult life carried out by the Centre for Research on the Wider Benefits of Learning (Feinstein et al., Citation2005). In this study, the cohort born in 1970 was studied, both with respect to their involvement in different types of organisations at the age of 16, and their situation at the age of 30. The aim was to see what type of relationship there might be between membership in an organisation or not during the adolescence and the likelihood of being in social risk at the age of 30. To discern this type of relationship, longitudinal studies are needed, such as in this case, although establishing causal relationships has several methodological problems. With due precaution, these authors reached the conclusion that practising sport did not have much effect on social inclusion/exclusion, and that family variables have a great deal of impact on participation in organisations related to the church or scouts. In contrast, membership in youth clubs brings a higher risk of social exclusion (measured, for example, by the crime rate). These authors’ conclusion is that peer group socialisation is quite strong, and that participation in youth clubs for young people in unfavourable social conditions only serves to reinforce the pathways of social exclusion, and that intervention is needed precisely in these settings.
4. In a recent study carried out in Spain, it appears that the skills acquired by young people involved in youth councils are valuable for enterprises, although the latter do not recognise them so much and they do not use them in staff selection processes (Vidal, Citation2006). But the claims of the so‐called third sector and youth organisations will push to improve and to increase this kind of recognition, as the Youth Salto European network asserts (http://www.salto-youth.net/bridgesforrecognition/).
5. The Survey of Young People of Catalonia is a periodic survey commissioned by the Secretariat General of Youth Affairs of Catalonia. For the first time in the 2002 edition, a device was introduced to gather longitudinal data in the realms of education, work and family, which was what enabled us to perform the analysis presented in this article.
6. Another aim of the research project was also to do interviews with a control group, people with similar transition pathways but without experience in associations. Unfortunately, it was not possible due to the resources available, but the idea still remains for future research.