Opportunities and Barriers at the Transition from Education to Work. A Comparative Youth Study in Azerbaijan, Georgia and Tajikistan
Duration: 1 July 2015 - 31 October 2019
Funding: VolkswagenStiftung; funding initiative "Between Europe and Orient", call "Institutional change and social practice. Research on the political system, the economy and society in Central Asia and the Caucasus"
Funding Volume: 437,117 Euro
Research network:
20 researchers from 5 countries
Project director: Prof. Dr. Michael Gebel
Cooperation partners:
Tair Faradov (International Centre for Social Research ICSR, Azerbaijan)
Rajab Sattarov (ICSR and Baku State University, Azerbaijan)
Irina Badurashvili (Georgian Centre of Population Research GCPR, Georgia)
Giorgi Meladze (I.Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University, Georgia)
Subhon Ashurov (Technological University of Tajikistan, Dushanbe, Tajikistan)
Saodat Olimova (SHARQ Research Center, Tajikistan)
Involved researchers at the University of Bamberg:
Prof. Dr. Michael Gebel (Project Director)
Eliza Mandieva (Research Associate)
Short description:
This interdisciplinary project carries out a multi-country study on youths’ labour market integration in Azerbaijan, Georgia and Tajikistan in times of increasing uncertainty. Based on a micro-macro theoretical model we study the opportunities and constraints young individuals face during their transition from education to work in different cultural, economic and institutional contextual settings. Original data are produced in a mixed-method approach with a focus on conducting three large-scaled quantitative youth surveys (N=2,000 persons per country) and supplementary qualitative in-depth interviews in a comparative design in Azerbaijan, Georgia and Tajikistan. The explicit focus on studying the dynamic processes of youth transitions in a life course perspective represents the key innovation of the project. A multidimensional perspective on both objective and subjective dimensions of the situation of young people is applied in order to reach a holistic assessment and to understand how objective conditions are translated into subjective youth identities and vice versa. At the institutional level, it is analysed how education and training institutions, labour market institutions and related segmentation, welfare institutions and family/gender regimes ease or hamper youth chances of a successful integration into gainful employment. By performing comparative analyses examples of best practises and recommendations for institutional reforms and policies will be developed that help improving the transition from school-to-work in particular and the socio-economic situation of youths in general in the South Caucasus and Central Asian region.
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