Job insecurity and precariousness lead Young Italian people to stop in their paths of life and life plan. The effect is to lead them in a spiral of marginality and demotivation typical of NEETs ...(young people who do not work, do not study and are not in a period training), with a serious impairment of the quality of life. The aim of this work is to show the impact of the occupational condition on the well-being of young people, both from a static and dynamic point of view, by using the database of the “
Rapporto Giovani
” longitudinal survey, a representative sample of Young Italian people. The entrance and the exit from the NEET condition have a significant impact on well-being and quality of life of Young Italian People. The Life Satisfaction acts not only as an effect of the change of occupational status, but also as a predictor. Finally, a new project,
LikeYouth
, is presented. It aims at improving the current understanding of the conditions in which young Italians find themselves during the acquisition of autonomy and in the active job search via Social Media Data, by using a new Facebook application,
LikeYouth
, that gathers information regarding Facebook profiles and Likes on Facebook Pages of each user.
This study offers a descriptive overview of changes in fertility plans during the COVID-19 crisis in a sample of the young population (18-34) in Italy, Germany, France, Spain, and the United Kingdom. ...The data were collected between 27 March and 7 April 2020. Our results show that fertility plans have been negatively revised in all countries, but not in the same way. In Germany and France fertility plans changed moderately, with many people still planning or postponing their decision to have a child. In Italy, however, the proportion of abandoners is much higher than in the other countries, and the proportion of those deciding to postpone their plans is lower. Moreover, across countries the demographic characteristics of individuals appear to be associated with fertility plans in different ways. In Italy, abandoners are common among individuals younger than 30 and those without a tertiary education. In Germany, abandoners are slightly more prevalent in the regions most affected by COVID-19. In the United Kingdom, the individuals that most frequently abandoned their fertility plans are those who expect the crisis to have a dramatic negative effect on their future income. Finally, in France and Spain we do not observe a clear pattern of revision of fertility plans.
This study investigates the association between objective and subjective indicators of economic uncertainty, generated by the COVID-19 health and economic crisis, and young Italians' fertility plans ...during the 2020. We use unique repeated cross-sectional data, collected at different time points during the pandemic (March and October/November 2020) together with pre-COVID data (2016). The data offer a standard fertility intention question pre- and during-COVID, and also a direct question on whether pre-COVID fertility plans have been confirmed, postponed or abandoned. In March 2020, individuals with more vulnerable occupations show a lower probability of intending to have a(nother) child in the short-term and a higher probability of abandoning their pre-COVID fertility plan; in October 2020 changes in fertility plans do not vary by employment condition. Instead, both in March and October, those who suffered from a negative income shock and those with negative expectations on their future income and occupation are more likely to abandon their pre-pandemic fertility plan compared to their better off counterparts. Overall, economic uncertainty seems to have similarly affected men and women's fertility intentions. Our findings point to the fact that the unequal economic consequences of the pandemic also produced and will produce heterogeneous effects on fertility intentions.
This study investigates the association between objective and subjective indicators of economic uncertainty, generated by the COVID-19 health and economic crisis, and young Italians' fertility plans ...during the 2020. We use unique repeated cross-sectional data, collected at different time points during the pandemic (March and October/November 2020) together with pre-COVID data (2016). The data offer a standard fertility intention question pre- and during-COVID, and also a direct question on whether pre-COVID fertility plans have been confirmed, postponed or abandoned. In March 2020, individuals with more vulnerable occupations show a lower probability of intending to have a(nother) child in the short-term and a higher probability of abandoning their pre-COVID fertility plan; in October 2020 changes in fertility plans do not vary by employment condition. Instead, both in March and October, those who suffered from a negative income shock and those with negative expectations on their future income and occupation are more likely to abandon their pre-pandemic fertility plan compared to their better off counterparts. Overall, economic uncertainty seems to have similarly affected men and women's fertility intentions. Our findings point to the fact that the unequal economic consequences of the pandemic also produced and will produce heterogeneous effects on fertility intentions.
With the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in Europe during the first months of 2020, most of the governments imposed restrictive measures to people mobility and physical distance (the lockdown), ...which severely impacted on the economic activities and performance of many countries. Thus, the health emergency turned rapidly into in an economic crisis. The COVID-19 crisis in Europe increased the uncertainty about the economic recovery and the end of health emergency. This situation is supposed to have conditioned individuals’ life course path with the effect of inducing people to postpone or to abandon many life plans.
This paper aims to explore and describe whether the rise of health emergency due to the COVID-19 has delayed or vanished young people’s intention to leave the parental home, in order to establish their own household, during 2020 in five European countries: Italy, Germany, France, Spain and the UK. Using data from an international survey from the “Youth Project”, carried out by the Toniolo Institute of Advanced Studies, this paper implements generalized logistic models for ordinal dependent variables to investigate the factors associated with a possible revision of the choice of leaving the parental home for a representative sample of 6000 respondents aged 18 to 34, interviewed between March and April 2020. In particular, we compare the effect of the occupational condition and the perceived income and employment vulnerability on the chance of confirmation, postponement or abandonment of the pre-pandemic plan across the five selected European countries.
Results show that Italy, Spain and the UK are the countries with the highest probability of a downward revision of the intentions of leaving the nest. Especially in these countries, having negative expectations about changes in the individual’s and family’s future income is associated with the choice of abandoning the purpose of leaving the parental home. However, the vulnerability of the category of temporary workers particularly arises in Southern European countries: young people with precarious jobs seem to be the most prone to negatively revise their intentions of leaving, even compared with those not working.
Given a population at a specific time point, it is often of interest to identify the entry age into typical stages of life, such as being young, becoming adult and elderly. These age cutoffs are ...important because they influence the public opinion and have an impact on policy decisions. An issue of great social relevance is defining the threshold beyond which a person becomes elderly. Fixed cutoffs are debatable because of their conventional nature which disregards issues such as changing life expectancy and the evolving structure of the age distribution. The above shortcomings can be overcome if age cutoffs are defined
endogenously
, i.e., relative to the whole age distribution of each country at a specific time point. We pursue this line of research by presenting an analysis whose main features are: (1) establishing a relationship between a country’s
welfare regime
and its age distribution and aging process, together with the identification of four clusters of countries corresponding to distinctive welfare models and (2) a Bayesian hierarchical dynamic model which accounts for the uncertainty in the time series of measurements of the endogenous cutoffs for the countries in the sample, as well as for their clustering structure. Our analysis leads to
model-based
estimates of country-specific endogenous age cutoffs and corresponding aging indicators. Additionally, we provide
cluster-specific
estimates, a novel contribution engendered by the use of hierarchical modeling, which widens the scope of our analysis beyond the countries which are present in the sample.
This study accounts for the heterogeneous consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic on fertility plans and behaviours, by focusing on the motivations for suspended pre-Covid fertility plans and on those ...for new fertility plans that arose during the pandemic. We rely on unique data collected with a repeated cross-sectional survey conducted in April/May 2021 and October/November 2021 on a sample of young Italians (aged 18-34). We estimate a set of multinomial and logit models to examine some correlates of fertility plans and behaviours. Then, we provide a more qualitative analysis of the reasons behind the resulting patterns of associations. Changes in fertility plans and behaviours from pre-COVID intentions clearly show that the economic recession burdens unequally individuals and their opportunities to cope with obstacles to both work and family involvement. At the same time, those who started to plan childbirth during the pandemic, frequently cite as important motivations the increased opportunities to enjoy the family life, the more balanced work and family involvement, the higher share of domestic tasks in the couple, and the improved relationship quality. Our results suggest the need for exploring also positive channels through which the Covid-19 crisis had provided opportunities for planning new births.
The Great Recession had a strong effect not only on the economy of developed countries but also on family dynamics. Many studies investigate how the crisis affected fertility behavior, but the link ...between economic shocks and childbearing is still debated. Most studies argue that fertility responds to recessions with only a temporary postponement of first births by young women. A paper by Comolli and Bernardi (2015), though, finds a permanent positive effect of the Great Recession in the United States on childlessness among women in their late thirties. In light of these results, we test whether a similar effect is found in a different context, i.e., Italy. We apply the difference-in-difference method to synthetic cohorts of Italian childless women in their late thirties to assess whether the crisis had a permanent impact on the cohorts' childlessness rates. We use the Istat 2004-2013 Italian Labor Force Survey (LFS). During the Great Recession in Italy, contrary to the United States, childlessness among women around the age of 40 registered short-term negative fluctuations. Only mid-educated women seem to have slightly postponed first births during the crisis.
Traditional versus Facebook-based surveys Kalimeri, Kyriaki; Beiro, Mariano G.; Bonanomi, Andrea ...
Demographic research,
01/2020, Volume:
42, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
BACKGROUND Social media in scientific research offers a unique digital observatory of human behaviours and hence great opportunities to conduct research at large scale, answering complex ...sociodemographic questions. We focus on the identification and assessment of biases in social-media-administered surveys. OBJECTIVE This study aims to shed light on population, self-selection, and behavioural biases, empirically comparing the consistency between self-reported information collected traditionally versus social-media-administered questionnaires, including demographic and psychometric attributes. METHODS We engaged a demographically representative cohort of young adults in Italy (approximately 4,000 participants) in taking a traditionally administered online survey and then, after one year, we invited them to use our ad hoc Facebook application (988 accepted) where they filled in part of the initial survey. We assess the statistically significant differences indicating population, self-selection, and behavioural biases due to the different context in which the questionnaire is administered. RESULTS Our findings suggest that surveys administered on Facebook do not exhibit major biases with respect to traditionally administered surveys in terms of neither demographics nor personality traits. Loyalty, authority, and social binding values were higher in the Facebook platform, probably due to the platform's intrinsic social character. CONCLUSION We conclude that Facebook apps are valid research tools for administering demographic and psychometric surveys, provided that the entailed biases are taken into consideration. CONTRIBUTION We contribute to the characterisation of Facebook apps as a valid scientific tool to administer demographic and psychometric surveys, and to the assessment of population, self-selection, and behavioural biases in the collected data.
This work investigates the relationship between family variables (parents' educational level, relationship quality, intrusiveness, support, and autonomy) and young Italians' status as NEETs (Not in ...Employment, Education, or Training). We used data from a representative sample of 9,087 young Italians. Each participant filled out an anonymous online questionnaire that contained several scales to measure the variables mentioned above. The results reveal that parents' educational level and support have a protective effect on the risk of becoming a NEET for both genders. Autonomy has a specific negative impact for males while intrusiveness has a positive impact mainly for females.
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