Rafael Merino

Pathways from school to work: can the competences acquired in leisure activities improve the construction of pathways?

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.

Emancipation enlargement and the acquisition of autonomy by young people in Catalonia

This article analyses family emancipation and the transition from school to work in the context of transition to adulthood in Catalonia, and discusses some central issues of youth sociology. The data used have been provided by the 2002 Catalan Young People Survey (Casal et al.,2004), carried out in 2002 and 2003, which was commissioned by the Catalan government and managed by the Education and Work Research Group (Autonomous University of Barcelona). The survey was done with a representative sample of 2000 young people from Catalonia aged between 15 and 29. This article explains the postponement of leaving home, the new degrees of autonomy managed by young people and the relationship between the age of emancipation and the complexity of transition from school to work. Finally, we highlight some conclusions with regard to the theoretical framework and policy-making issues.