Employment Status and Well-Being: A Longitudinal Study on Young Italian People

Abstract

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.