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DOI: 10.1177/1103308806059812 2006; 14; 33 YoungRafael Merino and Maribel Garcia CataloniaEmancipation enlargement and the acquisition of autonomy by young people in

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© 2006 Tidskriftforeningen YOUNG, SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on April 12, 2008 http://you.sagepub.comDownloaded from

33Nordic Journal of Youth ResearchYoungARTICLECopyright © 2006SAGE Publications(London,Thousand Oaks CAand New Delhi)www.sagepublications.comVol 14(1):33–4710.1177/1103308806059812

Emancipation enlargement and the acquisition ofautonomy by young people in CataloniaRAFAEL MERINOAutonomous University of Barcelona,SpainMARIBEL GARCIAAutonomous University of Barcelona,SpainAbstractThis article analyses family emancipation and the transition from school to work in thecontext of transition to adulthood in Catalonia,and discusses some central issues ofyouth sociology.The data used have been provided by the 2002 Catalan Young PeopleSurvey(Casal et al.,2004),carried out in 2002 and 2003,which was commissioned by theCatalan government and managed by the Education and Work Research Group(Autonomous University of Barcelona).The survey was done with a representativesample of 2000 young people from Catalonia aged between 15 and 29.This articleexplains the postponement of leaving home,the new degrees of autonomy managedby young people and the relationship between the age of emancipation and thecomplexity of transition from school to work.Finally,we highlight some conclusionswith regard to the theoretical framework and policy-making issues.Keywordsautonomy,emancipation,longitudinal studies,transition to adult life,youth

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INTRODUCTIONThis article presents the results of a research project carried out in 2002 and 2003.The study was done with a representative sample of 2000 young people fromCatalonia1aged between 15 and 29. The design of the research enabled us to developa theoretical framework on the transition to active life from a biographical point ofview – a subject on which our research group has been working since the 1980s.2We had prepared a questionnaire from a longitudinal point of view and gatheredrecent data on the social reality of young Catalans. We highlight the study of Cataloniaas a case within the European context but, when data are available, we make somecomparisons with other studies.The article has three sections. The first one is an outline of the theoreticalframework that justifies our epistemological and methodological choices in thecontext of a theoretical discussion about the concept of youth transition. The secondsection focuses on aspects related to the autonomy of young people, particularly onissues related to everyday life. Increasing autonomy among young people has been afact that has provoked the emergence of agency in the explanation of transition. Inthe third section, we relate the processes of autonomy acquisition with family eman-cipation and the transition to working life, namely, the relation between socialconstraints related to the educational system and the labour market, and the oppor-tunities deriving from both. To conclude, we summarize several considerations thatare relevant to policy-making.THEORETICAL ISSUES OF YOUTH SOCIOLOGYTo be young involves a recognition of a social status attached to an implicit systemof standards and requirements. Individuals are young when they are a certain age orthey comply with some social conditions defined by adults according to indicationsof status and roles (Allerbeck and Rosenmayr, 1979). Statistically, and according toadministrative institutions, young people are classified as an age group between 15and 29 years old (Youth Department, Eurostat). But this is a consideration that canchange according to the geographical context and historical period. The identifi-cation between youth and a specific age group is a consequence of the political actionof institutions or of empirical needs, but it is not a sociological concept in itself.Traditionally, sociological theories have defined youth as an age group or a lifestage (Bendit and Hein, 2004). The analysis of youth as an emerging reality in indus-trial societies has been largely influenced by structural and functionalist theoriesbased on an adultocratic point of view focusing on the formal rites of passage andnormative deviations of young people (Feixa, 2002; Pugeault-Cicchelli et al., 2004).During the 1960s, the social movements led by young people (i.e. the students’movement) and critical theory changed the traditional point of view from the trajec-tory of life course to generation. Borrowing the concept of generation from KarlMannheim, young people began to be viewed as a new generation who illustratedvalues of social change and, according to ‘instrumental Marxism’, even a new socialclass (Feixa, 2002).Both approaches share the same handicap: the homogenization of young peopleand externalization of young people by social structure (Baudelot and Establet, 2000).34Young14(1)