The doctoral thesis is part of the CAPSINES project (Accumulation and use of social capital in young people with unstable employment trajectories), a project interested in the effects that inequalities in the personal network of contacts and the resources embedded in it have on young people’s chances of finding employment. From a methodological point of view, the CAPSINES project collects sequential information of a retrospective nature, thanks to the use of the biographical grid technique implemented in the context of a hybrid survey. In this way, 150 interviews (with an average duration of about 90 minutes) were conducted with young people (30-34 years old) in the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona. The thesis is interested in the different types of social capital (bonding, bridging and linking) and their relationship with access to employment in a context of unstable employment trajectories, which are analysed by means of sequence analysis.
The thesis is structured as a compilation of articles. The first of these articles has a theoretical character, where the differences between the types of social capital bonding, bridging and linking are discussed. The second article first reviews the quantitative indicators used in the literature to approximate the types of social capital and then discusses the relevance or otherwise of the operationalisations used. The third article addresses the role of the relationship between status and bond strength in characterising the instrumental support obtained for access to employment. It highlights the important role played by strong hierarchical ties (or hierarchical bonding) in young people’s access to employment, a possibility that has generally gone unnoticed in the literature. Finally, the fourth article proposes a mixed approach, combining sequence analysis and qualitative content analysis to analyse the extent to which the relationship between educational attainment and career development is mediated by the use of social contacts. Considering that educational attainment is the variable that most influences career paths, the cases are classified according to whether or not they illustrate the relationship between educational attainment and career paths.
Taken together, this compilation provides new insights into the use of social capital along the employment trajectories of young people, and in particular among those who experience unstable employment trajectories. The results obtained are useful for the design and development of public policies aimed at reducing youth unemployment and job instability, as they emphasise the role played by the social environment of these young people, an aspect often forgotten when designing these policies.
Author: Alejandro González Heras
Supervisor: Joan Miquel Verd
Date of thesis defense: 18/09/2024
