Lived experiences: Young and N.E.E.T. | Audrey Friggieri

Research about ‘young people who are not in education, employment or training’ (NEET) is voluminous, often conducted quantitatively and from a judgemental stance that views this area and the young people concerned as a social problem (e.g. Arnardottir, 2020; Bonanomi & Rosina, 2020). Unfortunately, scarce attention is given to the lived experiences of being NEET, a gap that my study at the Faculty for Social Wellbeing attempts to address by researching young persons who find themselves suspended between past compulsory schooling and the transition into adulthood, which is primarily symbolised by entry into the labour market.

This research study seeks to shed more light on NEET young people’s life worlds to inform policy decision-making about education, training, and employment during late teenage hood and early adulthood. The main questions that the research seeks to answer are the following: (i) How do young people in the situation labelled ‘NEET’ interpret their situation? (ii) What was their experience of school like? Moreover, (iii) How do they visualise their future – where do they see themselves in five years, for example?

This research prioritises each participant’s unique experiences and life trajectories by adopting the approach of hermeneutic phenomenology. The data was collected through participant observation and semi-structured in-depth interviews with fourteen 18-24-year-old young men and women – 8 males and six females – and analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (Smith et al., 2022). The participants were recruited from Youth Guarantee and through personal networks. The interview questions addressed perceptions of the participants’ lives, how they perceived their future, the impact of school experiences, their constructs of success and failure, and the impact of relationships with significant others.

The findings yielded seven personal experiential themes shared by all the participants:

Personal narratives of hardship – this theme highlighted how the participants have had to battle on a personal level throughout their school years, circumstances that put added pressure on them, a weight on their shoulders that they often bore silently out of shame, fear of judgment, or the inability to articulate their suffering;

The impact of previous school experiences – this theme draws attention to school practices that tend to perpetuate discrimination, potentially alienating different young people from engaging in education and training;

Use of time – the everyday realities of young people in Malta who are not in education, employment, or training (NEET) are foregrounded in this theme, focusing on how they spend typical days. This analysis reveals different temporal organisations and the activities they consider essential to structure their time.

Success and failure – this theme demonstrates the participants’ values and beliefs as independent human beings searching for meaning;

Life attitudes – this theme sheds more light on whether the participants feel that they are victims or whether they feel that they have the power to determine their destiny and the extent to which these beliefs reflect their choices;

Coping – the research participants’ particular knowledge and skills in dealing with life, and especially with challenging situations, are encapsulated in this theme;

Future projections – this theme reveals how these young people visualise themselves in five years, and how this projection might relate to how they look at themselves at this stage.

Most noteworthy is the fact that the theme of resistance to structures – and therefore agency – is shared across all the major themes on various levels. Their exercise of personal power indicates that they are not mere victims of imposed structures but can act on their own devices to transform themselves and their circumstances, too. From a social justice perspective, the NEET label is inadequate because of its blindness to the complexity and flux that characterises the lives of young people everywhere. In this sense, it cannot be used as an effective tool to address social inequalities and injustice. The research participants wished they could have been understood more at school and given more time and attention without resorting to labels and ‘special treatment’. The participants wanted school to engage with their realities and knowledge rather than imposing uniformity, a false neutrality, and inflexible syllabi that would be irrelevant in a ‘liquid’ world and an ever-changing future job market.

References

• Arnardottir, J. R. (2020). Transition from school to work: Icelandic young people in NEET. Youth on the Move: Tendencies and Tensions in Youth Policies and Practices. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvx8b70v.6
• Bonanomi, A., & Rosina, A. (2020). Employment status and well-being: A longitudinal study on young Italian people. Social Indicators Research, 0123456789.
• Smith, J. A., Flowers, P., & Larkin, M. (2022). Interpretative phenomenological analysis: Theory, method and research. (2nd ed.). Sage.
• 180-190.