IET open seminar: “Special NEETs: Reexamining institutional effects on school-to-work transitions with a focus on young people with disabilities across Europe”

Abstract

Comparative research on school-to-work transitions demonstrates the crucial institutional linkages between the education system and the labour market in shaping STWT. However, social background characteristics also massively influence education, occupational, and employment outcomes of STWT. Given contradictory results and recent pressures on education and employment institutions, we analyze how institutional effects on STWT differ for disadvantaged groups in a large sample of European countries, by focusing on disabled young adults. Building
upon research investigating cross-national variation in STWT, we uncover the extent to which various established institutional effects mediate the association between NEET and disability and thereby explain cross-national variation in the STWT of disadvantaged groups by focusing on persons with disabilities. We analyse factors, well-developed in the research literature – welfare regimes, educational stratification, vocational specificity and employment protection legislation (EPL) – and additionally that of institutional stigmatization, which has been established in relation to life chances of disabled persons – to explain considerable cross-national differences.

ZOOM

Biography

Dr. Christian Brzinsky-Fay is senior researcher at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB). He studied Political Science at Free University Berlin and did his PhD in Social Policy at University of Tampere, Finland. His research interests are school-to-work transitions, life course research, comparative social science and quantitative methods. Together with his colleagues Prof. Ulrich Kohler and Magdalena Luniak, he implemented sequence analysis in the
statistical software Stata.

The open seminar is organized by the Centre of Excellence in Interdisciplinary Life Course Studies (IET) and is funded by the European Union Regional Development Fund (ASTRA project “TLU TEE Tallinn University as a promoter of intelligent lifestyle”).