A Decataldo

Advantages of Administrative Data: Three Analyses of Students’ Careers in Higher Education

This paper focuses on the potentiality of transformation of cross-sectional administrative information into longitudinal sociological data. The case study focuses on the Sapienza University of Rome administrative archives and the strategies of extrapolation and management of its registered students’ information in order to obtain a longitudinal data set. Furthermore, this paper shows the analysis of this longitudinal data set in order to highlight the utility of this kind of data structure and with an aim to: (1) evaluate Italian Higher Education reform policies and their implementation outcomes with reference to their main purposes through a quasi-experimental research; (2) prove that the Sequence Analysis (SA) tools are suitable for studying the complexity of Italian higher education students’ careers; (3) analyse the factors (also contextual) that have had an impact on the success/failure throughout the students’ academic careers (through Event History analysis, EH).

Gender-sensitive data: the state of the art in Europe*

ABSTRACT Gender statistics play a crucial role in social research and in the creation of gender sensitive policies. Gender statistics document the situation of women and men around the world, making it easier to raise awareness about inequalities between them, to monitor gender equality and promote actionable change. There is thus a need to encourage awareness about gender statistics and their usefulness in gender mainstreaming. The paper has different aims: (1) to discuss the role of gender statistics and gender sensitive indicators; (2) to give an overview of the main gender sensitive European databases; (3) to present the European Commission Strategy on Gender Equality; (4) to display information collected by the European Institute for Gender Equality (Eige) database; (5) to promote proposal for increasing the gender sensitivity of social indicators.

Gli esiti occupazionali dei laureati in Sociologia

L’articolo analizza i laureati triennali in Sociologia negli anni a cavallo della crisi economica. Si mostrano le difficoltà nel trovare un impiego e il peggioramento per le ultime coorti. Si osserva la diffusione massiccia di posizioni contrattuali instabili e si mostra inoltre che spesso, anche in presenza di un impiego, i laureati continuano a cercare un nuovo lavoro. Trova conferma l’usuale maggior difficoltà del Mezzogiorno, mentre laureate e laureati mostrano performance occupazionali molto simili.

L'esito delle carriere degli studenti nell'università riformata: il caso Sapienza

The article is based on a research program aimed to identify strong and weak aspects of the implementation of the decree DM 509/1999 in the Italian university system and to evaluate whether the characteristics of the decree DM 70/2004 are able to respond to the critical issues that have emerged. The context of analysis is the University of Rome «Sapienza», chosen because of the institution’s numerous and composite dimensions covering all branches of scientific disciplines. From a substantive point of view, the phenomena of dropping-out, of delay in the course of studies and of the small numbers of graduations were analyzed using administrative data. From a methodological point of view, students’ careers were analyzed through multidimensional longitudinal models. The basic assumption of the research design is that a longitudinal perspective offers a more exact and detailed overview of university careers, in light of their nature of processes. The monitoring of such processes at short intervals of time (a semester) allows a comprehensive reconstruction of events/incidents potentially significant for the final outcome.