Conference Program

In recent years, the NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training) rate in Italy has declined significantly. Yet this aggregate improvement conceals the persistence of structural inequalities that continue to shape young people’s transitions to adulthood. Previous research has consistently identified age and gender as key determinants of NEET risk (Odoardi et al. 2022, 2023; Zanfrini & Giuliani 2023, Van Vugt et al. 2020, 2025). Framing NEET status within a transition to adulthood perspective, this study focuses on gender differences in long-term NEET experiences in Italy (Villani, 2026).

The analysis adopts a two-step strategy. First, BES ISTAT indicators are used descriptively to outline regional socio-economic inequalities and to identify structural territorial patterns, particularly in relation to labour market fragility, childcare provision and female employment rates. Second, PIAAC 2023 microdata are employed to estimate the probability of being long-term NEET at the individual level, with separate models for men and women. The relationship between territorial conditions and individual outcomes is therefore interpretative rather than based on a multilevel statistical design.

The gendered dimension of NEET status has been widely documented in both Italian and international literature. Our findings confirm that long-term NEET status assumes markedly different configurations for men and women, reflecting asymmetric mechanisms that operate throughout the transition to adulthood.

For men, long-term NEET status is primarily associated with the intersection of low parental education, early school dropout and territorial disadvantage (Giancola & Salmieri 2021). Family formation appears, on average, to reduce the probability of remaining long-term NEET, suggesting that fatherhood may function as a factor reinforcing labour market attachment.

For women, the configuration differs substantially. Living in the Islands and having children are strongly associated with a higher probability of remaining long-term NEET, even when skills, educational background and social origin are comparable. Education, however, emerges as a significant protective factor. Higher levels of educational attainment reduce the likelihood of prolonged NEET status, consistent with recent OECD evidence showing that young women in Italy tend to experience longer educational trajectories than their male counterparts.

Yet this protective effect must be interpreted within a broader framework of gendered structural constraints. Although not directly modelled here, extensive evidence shows that women in the Italian labour market are disproportionately exposed to temporary, part-time and discontinuous contracts. Persistent labour market asymmetries and unequal returns to education may therefore limit the extent to which educational capital translates into stable employment, especially during family transitions(Rossier & Potarca 2025). The presence of a child significantly increases the probability of long-term NEET status for women, highlighting the asymmetric distribution of care responsibilities (Lantano et al. 2025, Ripamonti, 2025).

Overall, these findings point to a gendered stratification of risk in the transition to adulthood. Long-term NEET status does not reflect individual deficits but rather the cumulative interaction between family background, territorial inequalities, gender norms and labour market structures. The decline in aggregate NEET rates thus coexists with the persistence of deeply embedded mechanisms that systematically differentiate male and female trajectories (Villani, 2026).

The sociology of education today tends to offer a fragmented representation of the university experience, fragmented between performance indicators, services, careers and student living conditions. Even institutional surveys, although useful on a quantitative level, return a multidimensional but disjointed image of experience, helping to proceduralize it and reduce it to the sum of measurable variables. This contribution starts from a critique of this fragmentation and proposes to return an integrated vision of the university experience, assuming the concept of experience as a central theoretical category. The objective is twofold. Firstly, the work establishes a theoretical dialogue between Paolo Jedlowski and François Dubet, taking experience as an analytical key to understanding the transformations of contemporaneity. In Jedlowski, experience is embodied and socially situated knowledge, inscribed in a "world taken for granted", but exposed to fractures, crises and historical transformations. The experience changes with the processes of advanced modernity – functional differentiation, acceleration, mediatization – until it is configured as fragmented and devoid of narrative continuity. In Dubet, the sociology of experience focuses instead on the work of the actor who composes different logics of action – integration, strategy, subjectivation – in the absence of a unitary principle.Experience thus becomes the place where the subject produces coherence in the plurality of social rationalities. The comparison between the two authors allows us to articulate two complementary levels: on the one hand, the historical transformation of the conditions of possibility of experience; on the other, the reflective work through which individuals build meaning in fragmentation. Experience is neither an immediate given nor pure interiority, but a relational and historically situated process. The second objective consists in applying this theoretical framework to the specificity of the university institution, proposing an integration between the temporal and spatial dimensions of experience. If Jedlowski's reflection highlights the centrality of temporality – sedimentation, duration, fracture, discontinuity – our contribution introduces an explicit thematization of spatiality, conceived not as a simple container but as a relational configuration produced by the interweaving of practices, material devices and attributions of meaning. The university experience thus emerges as an interweaving of rhythms and thresholds, accumulations and ruptures, but also as a concrete configuration made up of classrooms, corridors, campuses, digital platforms and hybrid environments. Time and space co-produce each other in a specific ecology of learning and subjectivity. The university is assumed as a place to "experience" in a double sense: a space for the transmission of formalized knowledge and a context for the elaboration of a situated knowledge that goes beyond the official curricula. In this perspective, the university experience appears as a combination of institutional socialization, individual strategies and processes of subjectivation. Methodologically, this implies reconstructing it through biographical accounts, daily practices and analysis of organizational devices, taking the university as a privileged laboratory to observe the contemporary transformation of the relationship between institutional knowledge and knowledge of experience.

Situated within the Italian context and aligned with the panel’s call for multimethod, indicator‑oriented research, this paper presents the design and initial psychometric validation plan of Questionario sull’Attivazione Politica di Rizomi — a youth‑focused instrument that operationalizes the construct of Political Activation beyond formal schooling and conventional civic metrics. Building on Rizomi’s ongoing mixed‑methods action-research (2023–2025) in Genova and La Spezia, the instrument translates a Theory of Change that reframes youth participation as the evolving capacity to: imagine oneself in institutional roles, recognize and prioritize lived urgencies, approach decision‑making spaces, and deliberate the consequences of candidacy, including the right to elettorato passivo [1]. Conceptually, the work dialogues with comparative scholarship on youth engagement and competence frameworks, keeping agency, situated opportunities, and the deliberation‑to‑action passage at center stage [2–5]. Methodologically, the article reports the initial phase of scale development, focused on content and face validity and targeted item revision.

First, a Content and Face Validity Analysis ensures coverage of the theoretical domain—six attitudinal dimensions identified in the pilot (political imagination; awareness of urgencies; perceived distance from institutions; perceived knowledge of institutional functioning; resources/knowledge to run; perceived consequences of running)—and prioritizes respondent acceptability and linguistic clarity for 25–35 year‑olds in urban Italy. Expert appraisal and cognitive review are used to test definitional breadth and interpretability in relation to established models of democratic competences and youth engagement [2–5,6]. This approach follows classical recommendations in measurement design, using content representativeness and clarity as prerequisites for valid score interpretation [7,8].

Second, Item Revision is guided by pilot evidence: items with low variability (ceiling/floor effects) and weak internal structure in specific factors—especially “Urgency” and “Institutions”—are reformulated or pruned to increase discriminative power and reduce semantic overlap [1]. Proxy analyses conducted on the pilot (73 Likert items) indicate mixed reliability across blocks, with stronger internal coherence for “distance/discomfort” and “how to run” modules, and weaker coherence for “urgency” and parts of “institutions,” justifying focused rewriting and consolidation (e.g., merging candidacy intentions by probability/timing rather than by institutional level) [1]. This iterative refinement is consistent with best practice in construct specification and item reduction before confirmatory testing [7].

The contribution advances the indicator agenda in three ways: (a) it specifies a psychometric roadmap for a youth political‑activation scale that complements survey and administrative sources; (b) it theorizes activation as a situated progression detectable via hybrid indicators (self‑representation in public roles, situated institutional knowledge, threshold‑to‑action intentions), capturing experiences that often elude large‑scale measures [3–5]; and (c) it reports early quantitative associations — e.g., competence perceptions predicting local candidacy intentions — supporting the instrument’s predictive promise and policy relevance for non‑sectorial, integrated youth policies for democratic agency [1].

The contribution draws inspiration from the results of qualitative research conducted by INAPP, in collaboration with Save the Children Italy, as part of the Nationale Programme "Young Women and Work" co-financed by the European Social Fund Plus (ESF+) 2021-2027. The survey focusing on the condition of young women living in disadvantaged socio-economic conditions and facing educational poverty, covered four Italian metropolitan cities - Naples, Rome, Palermo, and Turin. Based on a number of in-depth interviews and focus groups with experts, the INAPP study analyses the educational paths of girls and young women, paying particular attention to early school leaving and dropout, and to labour and social inclusion processes, viewed through an intersectional perspective of gender (especially), age, class, and territory.

Among the many elements collected, several are in line with the key themes of the 4th SD Conference. Here, we want to highlight how the short stories told by the girls reveal a very different reality from the narrative contained in the NEET category, a sort of implicit critical review of the category's representative capacity, inadequate to grasp and make visible the complexity of the lack of participation of young women in education, training, and employment.

Moreover, interviews reveal young women who are anything but inactive, providing further evidence of the weakness of the NEET lens. In addition to being "normally" engaged in family care work, as usual marginalized by analysis and policies, these young women are often employed, or rather underemployed, in out-of-home activities, usually poorly (very poorly) paid, in jobs that, presented in all their murky shades of grey, bear the hallmarks of poor quality work. From this perspective, girls' early entry into the labour market, unless accompanied and indeed preceded by appropriate policy interventions, is likely to backfire rather than being a valuable resource for future success and autonomy, on-the-job training in poor work is training to become poor, marginalised, invisible workers.

In short, the stories of these girls shift the focus to the shortcomings of the education and vocational training system. Although schools claim to be inclusive, they generate mechanisms of silent exclusion such as the critical transitions between school levels, the cumulative effects of previous gaps, and the difficulty of embracing cultural and linguistic diversity without turning it into stigmatized deficits. For girls, this process of exclusion is intertwined with specific gender barriers - low self-esteem, family expectations, relational control dynamics - that weaken their relationship with the educational institution even before it becomes so fragile with the labour market. The NEET status, as mentioned, is not particularly relevant to the girls interviewed. Far from being the result of an individual choice or failure, it appears to be the outcome of cumulative processes that become entrenched throughout their lives: from early school leavings in primary school to critical transitions between school levels, to the intertwining of girls' expectations, gender stereotypes, family dynamics, and relational control that distances girls from education even before they start seeking for a job.

Despite its well-known limitations, the NEET category remains a crucial indicator for observing contemporary forms of youth vulnerability. More than a simple administrative classification, it can be used as a lens through which to analyse the intersection of educational inequalities, labour-market precarity, weak institutional support, and the subjective redefinition of transitions to adulthood. In Italy, where NEET rates remain structurally high in comparison with the rest of Europe, this condition takes particularly stratified forms, shaped by territorial, family and biographical differences.

This contribution presents findings from a broader research project conducted at INAPP on young NEETs in Italy, based on a mixed-method design. The study combined a CAWI survey involving 1,548 young people aged 15–34 with six in-depth interviews and three focus groups carried out with participants selected from the same research population. Within this broader research framework, the paper specifically foregrounds the qualitative component, treating it not as a merely illustrative complement to the quantitative evidence, but as a privileged analytical space for exploring biographical trajectories, the meanings attached to non-participation, and young people’s subjective relationships with work, time and the future.

As an introductory frame, the contribution also offers a brief overview of the growing role of digital platforms and, more broadly, technological and artificial intelligence tools in guidance, activation and intermediation processes targeting vulnerable young people. This perspective helps situate individual trajectories within a context in which access to opportunities and services increasingly depends on digital infrastructures, with outcomes that are not necessarily inclusive.

The qualitative analysis shows that very different experiences coexist under the NEET label: situations of temporary suspension, prolonged waiting, disrupted educational pathways, repeated employment failures, family constraints, emotional fragilities, and a gradual shrinking of young people’s capacity to imagine and plan their future. NEETness thus emerges not as a simple condition of inactivity, but as a biographically differentiated process produced through the interaction between structural constraints, institutional mediations, and the ways individuals make sense of their own experience.

The paper therefore seeks to offer a sociological interpretation of the NEET phenomenon that connects structural conditions with subjective experience, showing how NEET trajectories provide a privileged vantage point for understanding how contemporary societies distribute opportunities, reproduce inequalities, and shape young people’s access to social and labour citizenship.

This paper presents two composite indicators developed within the monitoring and evaluation INAPP programme on the Universal Civic Service (SCU): OKI-INAPP (Individual Employability Index) and ACCI-INAPP (Individual Active Citizenship Composite Indicator). SCU is framed as a policy promoting youth civic engagement and represents, in the Italian context, the first institutional setting to invest explicitly in informal learning outside traditional educational pathways, where young people develop civic, relational and organisational competences through community engagement.

The research programme originates from a question that challenges the dominant paradigm of active labour market policies, which has largely identified training as the main driver of employability while overemphasizing the individual dimension and underestimating contextual factors (Yorke, 2006). Is it plausible that higher employability may also be the product of a more conscious and enacted form of citizenship? Can the competences developed through civic engagement function as autonomous drivers of employability?

The study hypothesises that the dominant paradigm should be enriched by a dimension that has so far remained largely neglected: active citizenship. This dimension cannot be reduced either to technical competences or to traditionally measured soft skills and should not be considered simply additive to employability. Rather, active citizenship is understood as a constitutive component of employability (De Luca et al., 2019, 2021, 2022, 2024, 2026).

OKI-INAPP is a composite index that isolates the individual component of employability across four sub-indexes — education and training, work experience, labour market activation and mobility. This design reflects a precise epistemological choice: separating the individual dimension to make the autonomous weight of contextual conditions. ACCI-INAPP is the individual-level adaptation of the Active Citizenship Composite Indicator developed by CRELL (Hoskins & Mascherini, 2009), reformulated to capture active citizenship as an individual profile across three domains: democratic values, political participation and community life.

The research design adopts a mixed-method approach. A qualitative exploratory phase guided the construction of the indicators, while three CATI sample surveys (approximately 3,500 interviews representative of over 45,000 young people, within a longitudinal design) measured the outcomes of the experience across multiple dimensions — employability, active citizenship, employment status and professional reorientation. The OKI index was validated through statistical matching with administrative data from the Ministry of Labour’s Mandatory Communications database.

The results document democratic effect of SCU participation: employability increases on average by 12% following the experience, across gender, educational level, geographical area and family background. The disappearance of inactive young people and the professional reorientation of almost 20% of volunteers signal activated agency. Controlling for OKI, a young person living in a low-unemployment region has an almost fourfold probability of finding employment compared with a peer in Southern Italy.

The most original finding is that active citizenship exerts an autonomous effect on the probability of labour market entry even when controlling for individual employability (+16% employed among young people with high ACCI). From a capability approach perspective (Sen, 1999; Nussbaum, 2011), substantive freedoms should not be considered peripheral variables in the evaluation of youth policies, but rather constitutive dimensions of employability itself.