ABSTRACT

Long-running trends towards increasing inequality between the rich and poor across Europe have been exacerbated by the 2008 global financial crisis and its aftermath. As employment opportunities for young people diminish and as the welfare state is pulled back, pathways to adulthood change and become more difficult to navigate.

Transitions to Adulthood Through Recession consists of a collection of papers by researchers from Britain, Norway, Germany, Portugal, Italy and Greece, locating young people’s transitions to adulthood in their national social, economic and political contexts. It explores young adulthood with reference to generational continuity and change and intergenerational support. With a cross-national comparative framework, this volume highlights the importance of variations in structural contexts for young people’s transitions.

Bringing together authors across sub-disciplines such as the sociology of youth, family and kinship, class and inequality and life-course studies, Transitions to Adulthood Through Recession will appeal to academic social scientists as well as final-year undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in fields such as political science, sociology, youth studies, social policy, anthropology and psychology; and a wider public readership.

Chapter 1 of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license

chapter 2|18 pages

Youth research meets life course terminology

The transitions paradigm revisited

chapter 4|19 pages

How parents see their children's future

Education, work and social change in England

chapter 5|23 pages

Biography, history and place

Understanding youth transitions in Teesside

chapter 6|18 pages

Social inequality and the transition to education and training

The significance of family background in Germany

chapter 7|22 pages

Youth transitions and generations in Portugal

Examining change between baby-boomers and millennials

chapter 8|19 pages

Young people and housing transitions

Moral obligations of intergenerational support in an Italian working-class context

chapter 10|22 pages

Kinship, community and the transition to adulthood

Geographical differences and recent changes in European society