Background

The Outip project builds on the experience previously accumulated in the VulnYouth project.

VulnYouth analyzed the potential negative impact of job insecurity on youth mental health. Specifically, it hypothesized that this relationship was mediated by vulnerability and that an intersectional approach was necessary to fully understand the consequences of job insecurity among young people.

Precariousness is a much more complex concept than we initially thought: it includes meanings that go beyond working conditions and that are more related to the incapacity to secure a decent standard of living. The project shows how the perceived feeling of being in a precarious situation, more than having a non-permanent job, impacts young people’s mental health. Our results also demonstrate that labour precariousness and economic insecurity are distributed unequally across social groups, but feeling precarious is a situation that is diffused among all young people in Spain.

Key points

  1. Labour precariousness is a phenomenon that is not equally distributed across young people, whereas feeling precarious affects all, independently from their gender, age, or migrant background.
  2. 31% of our interviewees are at risk of depression/anxiety. Feeling precarious, and not a precarious job in itself, is crucial as an explaining factor.
  3. Feeling precarious goes beyond having a low-quality job; its meaning for our respondents also includes the incapacity to satisfy basic needs or access a decent standard of living.
  4. 40.6% of our sample stated that they suffer from at least one mental or physical health issue due to economic insecurity. Living alone is associated with greater economic insecurity.
  5. The economic security of households has been challenged in the post-pandemic era, especially due to the inflation crisis and rising energy costs. About 65% of those who feel extremely precarious, state that these have been factors of economic insecurity for their household.

Article

Maestripieri, L, Lanau, A, Soler-i-Martí, R., & Acebillo-Baqué (2024). Intertwined precariousness and precarity: Disentangling a phenomenon that characterises Spanish youth. International Journal of Social Welfare. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13510347.2024.2383795

The basics

VulnYouth Results Observatori Social La Caixa

VulnYouth: Project Summary Form