A Narrative Investigation into the Meaning and Experience of Career Destabilization in Italian NEET

Abstract

In the last few years, changes in the work market have produced effects on the transition school-to-work and, more specifically, on the ability to plan for the future, in particular in the Italian context. This study aims to explore the experiences of young people who have encountered difficulties in transition-to-work, and how unsuccessful experience are re-elaborated on the level of autobiographical narration. Using an Italian blog, the authors obtained narrative data from 461 NEET, young people not engaged in education, employment, or training. Textual Analysis was carried out to identify the thematic clusters and obtain the network pattern of lemmas to understand the process of meaning construction of NEET. The analysis shows three clusters: “Ideals: from training to professional life”, “Necessity: the job’s function”, and “Reality: the doing”. The potential of the narrative and the possible interventions are discussed.

Keywords

• university-work transition
• young adult
• neet
• textual analysis
• blog.