The sequence of steps in the analysis of youth trajectories

Abstract

The study of the school-to-work transition is based on longitu- dinal data, in the form of personal chronologies which require specific handling. Drawing on French research based on Cereq's longitudinal surveys, this article presents the different options that emerge in the course of statistical processing and explores their respective implications and challenges. Over the past fifteen years, public-sector statisticians involved with the analysis of the training-employment relationship have been amassing not only the usual socio-demogra- phic data on students and the jobs they hold but also a body of longitudinal information about their itineraries. The resulting treatment has now given rise to a yearly workshop where results and approaches can be compared 1 . Notwithstanding the large number of studies and samples alike, it seems to us that little profit has been drawn from this research in terms of accumulation attainments. While the shifting economic or institu- tional contexts in which these itineraries are defined make the comparison of results dif- ficult, the harmonisation of the different approaches and the kind of conclusions they lead to is not lacking in interest (Fenelon et al., 1997). In the analysis that follows, we begin by indicating the specificities of these data and the main approaches used to process them and then propose a detailed indication of what the factorial and typological methods have to offer.