Young individuals as microcosms of the Portuguese crisis

Magda Nico

doi:10.1080/21582041.2017.1393554

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe Portuguese crisis affected the country’s collective identity, and ‘the timing of life’ at which it struck individual lives in this case is also significant. Quantitative figures show that young people were particularly affected by this crisis. However, a long-run qualitative approach provides a multilayered and quite complex view of what this crisis is embedding in young people’s lives and minds. In qualitative research on ‘middle class’ transitions to adulthood carried out in 2009, 52 young adults were interviewed about their educational, residential, occupational and romantic lives. In a follow-up study, these individuals’ trajectories, plans and expectations are now updated; their past and present confronted; and effects of the crisis on their lives questioned. The discussion is held in the form of a critical approach to the theories of individualisation, and goes to the heart of the ‘generation in itself’ vs. ‘generation for itself’ and ‘biographies of choice’ vs. ‘discourses of choice’ debates.

Highlights

Citation for published item: Nico, M. (2017)
Magda is a sociologist specialized in Youth, Social Trajectories and Life Course Research and Methods
She is currently developing a follow-up study with young people interviewed before the Portuguese crisis

Summary

Young Individuals as Microcosmos of the Portuguese Crisis

The economic crisis in Portugal can be seen as an historical landmark that affects the route of a country’s collective and generational identity (Nico, 2013), but the timing of life in which is strikes changes significantly the effect it might have in people’s trajectories and understandings of those trajectories. The effects of the crisis were not yet felt or imagined, and its effects were merely speculated but not yet concretely experienced This serendipity effect of the crisis, of the Troika intervention and of the measures taken by the government on its behalf inspired a follow-up study that, mobilizing a multiplicity of life course research instruments (biographic interview, life calendar, focus of control exercise, past reality checks), carried out a re-interviewing process to the participants in 2009. This has been developed during 2016, seven politically dense years after the first interviews, in a new political context. The conclusion will sum up these results, calling attention to how qualitative understandings to highly quantifiable phenomenon – as financial or economic crisis – are necessary to grasp the nuances of a historically situated biography, which vary and oscillate from the identity to the explanation natures of narratives, or put in other words, between “realist” and “neo-positivist” approaches to life stories (Miller, 2000:13)

Methodology and data

Used as the

Social and economic situation

Conclusions