Topic: Who are Italian “NEETs”? A study on rural and non-rural NEETs’ social skills
Abstracts
After Greece, Italy is the second European country with the largest number of NEET (Istat, 2015), for a total of around 14 million young people aged between 15 and 19. The aim of this study is to investigate some characteristics and perceptions of the condition that characterizes Italian NEETs in rural and non rural area. In our work are considered rural area municipality with less than 10.000 inhabitants. this work sets the following objectives: a. to describe the characteristics of young NEETs in Italy, rural and non rural, with particular reference to socio-demographic variables such as age, marital status, parental status, in relation to gender and the amount of time of this condition; b. to analyze the life and social skill they perceive to have; c. to investigate the representations they have about high school. A group of 668 rural NEETs will be compared with 2230 non rural NEETs. The analyses are now running.
After the discussion of the results, some ideas of intervention will be discussed, for example “Team work” by Action Aid! that proposed a project with the aim of providing soft skills to the young NEET, exploitable within the labor market. This project lasted three months and was based on sport and job training (e.g. mock job interviews, editing CVs, etc.). The evaluation carried out in order to understand the young people’s perception of the exploitability of acquired soft skills and the project’s strengths and weaknesses showed the participants’ general satisfaction, and their identification of project as a good way to obtain several soft skills.