Socio-Demographic Vulnerability: The Condition of Italian Young People

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 comcept. In order to do that, we employed the Multiple Correspondence Analysis, using data provided by the Italian Multiscopo Survey, carried out in 2003 and named “Family and Social Actors”. Key words: socio-demographic vulnerability; risk; young people; multiple correspondence analysis