Abstract
For a kind of inertia effect, today the Italian welfare state protects the older too much and, on the contrary, it does not counter sufficiently the new risks associated with other phases of life. Not much seems to be implemented in favour of Italian young people who, as a matter of fact, seem to suffer a lot from the present changes: young people remain longer in the parental home and postpone setting up their own independent life to a most advanced age. In order to understand the situation of vulnerability increasingly widespread among young people, it seemed more and more necessary an in-depth analysis of the reasons and the subjective status of the discomfort that affects young people because of a delayed transition into adulthood. Therefore, we studied the self-perceived vulnerability situation experienced by Italian young people in different spheres of their life. The aim was to understand what is the subjective status that prevents young people from planning an adult life, having a partner and possibly having a child. In particular our analysis tries to bring together theoretical and methodological methods in the measurement of socio-demographic vulnerability concept. In order to do that, we employed the Multiple Correspondence Analysis, using data provided by the Italian Multipurpose Survey, carried out in 2003 and named “Household and Social Actors”.
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Notes
We talk of a “process” because there exist strong internal connections in this phenomenon, as each step is a premise or a consequence of the following one. As a matter of fact, the progressive shifting of the age when young people accomplish their education, enter labour market, choose and maybe buy a house (typical phenomenon of our country), leave their family of origin and start an adult affective life, do have effects on the other spheres of the life of young people.
Italian young people live longer in their family of origin and postpone starting an independent life to an older age (Istat 2006). The percentage of Italian young people living with their parents, although it decreases as they get older, has extraordinarily grown: the group of unmarried young men and women aged 25–34 and still living in their family of origin has passed from 35.5 to 43.3% from 1995 to 2005, going beyond the number of their peers cohabiting with a partner and their children (who, on their turn, have decreased from 40 to 29.4%).
The 2008 Family and Social Actors survey is still not available at the moment of the writing of this paper.
Considering that, in general, Italy is characterized by a high level of homogamy between the parents of a family and that, if not, it is the father who has a higher level of education, we thought that the educational level and employment status of the mother could better discriminate the situation experienced by different young people in their different families.
As proportions of missing answers for that variables are fairly high, we performed a deletion of respondents with missing data, since we do not want to deal with the further complicating issue of missing data. This reduces the original sample by about 17% and leaves around 10,000 respondents providing complete data on subjective vulnerability.
Considering that the multiple response question has 16 possible responses, the proportions of missing answers is quite high, and as it will be explained in the following these variables are not apt to be included actively in the multiple correspondence analysis.
In case of the large sample size is easy that the chi-squared test always reject the null hypothesis of independence.
Note that the interpretation of the multiple correspondence analysis is often based on proximities between points in a dimensional map (i.e., two or three dimensions). Proximities are important only between points from the same set (i.e., rows with rows, columns with columns) and, in particular when two row points are close to each other, they tend to select the same levels of variables. Therefore, the proximity between levels of different variables means that these levels tend to appear together in the observations, while the proximity between levels means that the groups of observations associated with these two levels themselves are similar.
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An erratum to this article can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11205-010-9579-6
Appendices
Appendix 1
See Table 3.
Appendix 2
See Table 4.
Appendix 3
See Table 5.
Appendix 4
See Fig. 4.
Percentage distribution of opinions (“How quiet do you feel about your…?”) by territorial area
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Busetta, A., Milito, A.M. Socio-Demographic Vulnerability: The Condition of Italian Young People. Soc Indic Res 97, 375–396 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-009-9507-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-009-9507-9