Transitions in Youth 2019

The Research Centre for Education and the Labor Market (ROA) of Maastricht University will host this year’s workshop.

The theme of this year’s workshop is: Problematic school-to-work transitions in Europe

In some European countries, school-to-work transitions appear to have become much more challenging and diverse during the last decade, and particularly so after the Great Recession. While some countries have reverted to pre-recession levels of youth unemployment, others still struggle with high youth unemployment, and long-term NEET rates that prove persistent and hard to influence with policies. Many young people enter the labour market in precarious jobs and have temporary contracts. Many do not find employment in their field of study. These inequalities in youth transitions could further cement social inequalities within countries.

So why are young people more likely to experience a problematic school-to-work transition in some countries than in others? Youth transition research has come a long way to provide us with important insights on the role of institutions, such as employment legislation and vocational training systems. At the same time, innovative and longitudinal micro data on diverse topics such as health, non-cognitive skills, networks, and time-use enable researchers to uncover mechanisms, some of which previously considered black boxes. This has increased our theoretical understanding of barriers some youth face while transitioning to the labour market.

However, more research exploring transition processes is still needed. Improved access to longitudinal data and improved methods to analyze sequences of events as well as to assess causal relationships, enable studying the school-to-work transition not as a linear process, but unveils the sequence of recurrent, interacting, and often parallel events in education and on the labour market that together shape the transition phase. Another promising avenue aims to explain how different people act in different contexts. Such research is necessarily inter-disciplinary and integrates theory and methods from sociology, demography, economics, and other disciplines.

The Network Committee therefore cordially invites authors to submit contributions concerning the area of youth transitions, especially – but not exclusively – the analysis of problematic transitions from education to the labour market in a macro-micro-macro perspective.  

Particular attention will be payed to the following themes:

• Causes and consequences of unsuccessful school-to-work transitions
• Youth Not in Employment, Education, and Training
• Longitudinal and sequence analysis of school-to-work transitions and trajectories
• Context influences in the life course
• Comparative country studies on institutional effects
• Impact evaluation of labour and educational policies

The list of suggested themes is neither complete nor exclusive. Theoretically driven empirical research on other aspects of youth transitions that is based on high-quality (longitudinal) data, experimental and intervention studies is also welcome. The committee also invites  conceptual contributions, systematic reviews, and meta analyses.

If you wish to present a paper at the workshop, please send an abstract (500 words) to the email address below by March 30, 2019. In keeping with our usual procedures, abstracts will be assessed for selection by the members of the Network Committee on the basis of their quality and relevance to the theme of the workshop. Authors will be notified of the decision regarding their paper by May 15, 2019 at the latest.

The conference fee is set at € 650 and includes four nights of accommodation (single room), lunches and social events (including conference dinner). Since only a limited number of places will be available, anyone who wishes to attend the conference without presenting a paper should inform the conference organisers about this as soon as possible. To ensure the smooth running of the workshop and to guarantee accommodation (which will be organized by the workshop staff), participants are requested to register and pay the conference fee by 15 June 2019.

To make papers available to workshop participants in advance, final (electronic) versions should reach the local organisers at the very latest by 17 September 2019.

Local organisers:
Mark Levels, Lynn van Vugt, Alexander Dicks and Katarina Weßling

>> Fore more information see conference website: http://tiy2019.com/