Research project
Project promoters: Comune di Sgonico – Zgonik (project coordinator), Comune di Duino Aurisina – Devin Nabrežina, Comune di Monrupino – Repentabor, Comune di San Dorligo della Valle – Dolina, Občina Sežana and Občina Hrpelje-Kozina
Project esecutors: Slovene Research Institute – SLORI (responsible: Norina Bogatec)
Project implementation period: March 2010 – March 2011
The project ‘Percorsi formativi e occupazionali dei giovani nell’area transfrontaliera’ (Educational and work paths of youth in the cross-border area) is financed by the Friuli Venezia Giulia region with the Regional fund for the Slovene linguistic minority, which promotes also initiatives that encourage the cross-border cooperation in such fields as culture, education, sport and leisure activities. The target of the project is tracing a training and professional profile of the young people, who live in the cross-border area and identifying their habits as regards their free time and cross-border mobility. It is mainly a research about the dynamics, which influence the passage to adulthood in an area, which is characterised by two different education and occupation systems.
The project is fully in tune with the directives and the considerations of the two European documents on the problems of the youth. In the first document (The White Paper of the European Commission – New Impulse for European Youth, Bruxelles 2001), the need to better understand the situation of the youth is defined as one of the four priority areas, together with participation, information and volunteering. The second document (Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions on Promoting young people’s full participation in education, employment and society) gives greater emphasis to the need for better research indications so as to define relevant politics for the youth.
We analyzed the profile of the young people born in the years from 1981 to 1985, who reside in the examined municipalities. This is an age group, which includes the so-called young adults (Rakar, Boljka 2009) and is very diversified as regards the education, working and personal experiences.
The data were gathered during a telephone conversation with a structured questionnaire. The research project was based on the method of retrospective studies, which allow the gathering of data, starting from an original event, defined in time (in this case the event is the end of the compulsory studies at school), and ending at the moment of the poll. We interviewed 586 young people, equally divided between the Slovene and the Italian part of the researched area.
The results of the research were published and presented to the public and private institutions, which operate in various ways on the territory under exam. Indeed, the objective consisted in enriching the comparison on the promotion of the intellectual and professional potential of the abovementioned municipalities in the framework of a “cross-border” observation of the development perspectives and of the enhancement of the Carst territory.