Context and methods

The research conducted over the course of this dissertation project is part of the collaborative project “Facing Critical events in early Adulthood: A normative Approach to Vulnerability and Life course Regulation”, to which I participated with other researchers during the four years of my thesis. For most of this period, I worked in close collaboration with Véronique Eicher (Post-doctoral researcher), Marlène Barbosa (PhD candidate), Aline Hofer (Master student), Christian Staerklé (project leader) and Alain Clémence.

This project is a sub-project (IP9) of the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research NCCR LIVES, granted by the Swiss National Science Foundation. NCCR LIVES is an interdisciplinary centre hosted by the universities of Lausanne and Geneva and bringing together researchers from psychology, sociology, social psychology, demography and

economics. Its mission is to examine, based on the analyses of life trajectories across different domains, the impact of structural, cultural and personal resources on overcoming

vulnerability. Being part of this project and of the larger LIVES family provided me with a perfect environment, making my PhD research an exciting journey full of opportunities, challenges and exchanges.

The aim of our team composed of social psychologists was to develop a comprehensive psychosocial approach to vulnerability and life course regulation. Specifically, the project focuses on the transition to adulthood and the various developmental tasks and adjustments that it requires (e.g., training decisions, finding a job…). Data collection was therefore done

with youth populations (aged 15 to 30) from three institutions in French speaking Switzerland over a period of several years (data collection for the fourth wave starts in May 2015).

Participants were contacted thanks to the agreement we concluded with the three respective institutions, a preparatory vocational school (pre-apprentices and apprentices), a high school (students) and the municipality of a major city (apprentices and young employees). The different backgrounds of participants reflect the diversity of the pathways characteristic of this age period. As our hypotheses require a sizeable proportion of disadvantaged group members, we included youth (many of which with an immigrant background) enrolled in vocational training who have difficulties or are still struggling to find an apprenticeship. We are very grateful to these three institutions that gave us such a valuable opportunity to reach youth from different social and cultural backgrounds, and above all, to all those adolescents and young adults who accepted generously to share their life experiences with us.

Several methods of data collection were used in this project; in addition to paper-pencil (sometimes online) questionnaires and in-depth interviews with a selected subgroup of participants, a third method of data collection was an online social network we designed specifically for this project and proposed to all participants. The features of this network and the rationales behind its proposition has been the focus of the chapter “Data collection through a social network: First impressions” (Eicher, Bakouri, Staerklé, Barbosa, & Clémence, in press), which is part of the collaborative book “Surveying vulnerabilities». Given that participants were generally resistant to use the social network, this tool was finally used as a means to communicate with participants and provide them with feedback rather than as a method of data collection. The difficulties associated with its use for data collection are explained in the chapter.

We describe in the following paragraphs the context of each institution, give an overview of the process of quantitative data collection over the three years, and a general description of the questionnaires.

Context of the three institutions. The first institution is a preparatory vocational school (PVS) attended by adolescents who express difficulty in managing the transition from compulsory schooling to vocational training. Participants affiliated to this institution are either apprentices who already started an apprenticeship, but need to be assisted during their

training, or pre-apprentices who are still looking for an apprenticeship position. This sub- sample also includes a considerable proportion of immigrants who are particularly prone to experience transitional vulnerability.

The second institution is a high school (HS) preparing students who aspire for higher education to the maturity diploma leading to admission in universities. The agreement we had with this institution allowed us to recruit 4th and 5th year students enrolled in the different

orientations.

Additionally, all employees and apprentices affiliated to the municipality of a major city in French speaking Switzerland (ML), aged between 15 and 30 years, were invited to

participate in our survey.

Questionnaires. The main questionnaire was composed of various sections: Job (vs. Training or Education according to the vocational status of the participant), Groups and identity, People around you (social support, needs responsiveness), Injustices and

discrimination, You (life satisfaction, self-esteem, coping-efficacy), Daily hassles (financial, interpersonal, health, security), Personal projects, Society (view of, and action in, society) and Personal information (socio-demographic variables). Data has been collected repeatedly with an interval of one year approximately. The questionnaires were not however identical over years. Some sections contained data aimed for longitudinal analyses (e.g., Job, You, Hassles,

Projects) and thus used (mainly) the same scales over the years. Other sections were not linked to longitudinal questioning and were therefore only present in some waves (e.g., injustices and discrimination, society) or were present in different waves but enclosed different measures (e.g., Groups and identity).

The dates of the three consecutive main data collections (waves 1, 2 and 3) are indicated in table 26. In addition, we also used a complementary questionnaire after the second data collection. The complementary questionnaire aimed at testing some additional measures, principally in the sections: Groups and identity (e.g., IOS scale with different groups,

multigroup ethnic identity), and Society (e.g., meritocracy and egalitarian beliefs, Perception of social organization and position). It was sent only to participants who indicated in the main questionnaire (2013’ data collection) they agree to complete a complementary questionnaire. Table 2 also indicates the total number of participants who completed the questionnaire at each data collection, their distribution in the three institutions (the last column in the table), and their distribution according to when they started their participation (the first column).

The procedure. The first data collection took place in classrooms during specially organized sessions both in the preparatory vocational school and in the high school. This was however not possible with municipality participants; because they are physically dispersed, the first questionnaire was sent to them by letter using the professional address provided to us by the institution. As indicated in the table, questionnaires were sent to more than 800

addresses of which 230 completed and returned the questionnaire.

Participants from the three institutions were then contacted the following years using the personal address that they mentioned in the first questionnaire (we asked both for postal and e-mail addresses). We first sent the online version of the questionnaire to the e-mail !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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addresses when available and then addressed paper questionnaires to all those who did not complete the online version or who only provided a postal address. As a consequence, and in contrary to the first year data collection where paper-pencil modality was the basic one, most participants in the following years completed the questionnaires online, except in the PVS (in 2013: Municipality 81%, HS 71%, PVS 9%; in 2014: Municipality 88%, HS 70%, PVS 9%)7.

PVS participants were indeed the less likely to provide e-mail addresses and many of them told us during the class sessions that they either don’t have (or forgot) their e-mail or did not use it frequently. To maximise response rates among this most vulnerable population, we obtained permission to personally collect data in the institution each year. Going to the institution each year allowed us to enhance the chances to reach pupils who already participated the previous years but also to recruit new participants (about 100 participants each year as indicated in table 2). Including new participants at each data collection was indeed important in order to keep this population represented in our sample, given that

accompanying them longitudinally was much harder compared to the rest of the sample (only 22.6% of first year PVS participants completed the three waves questionnaires compared to 57.4% in HS and 59.6% in ML). !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! T_{!D)!'2)'A)-!(0!*2)!-(;;):)0*!(03*(*/*(&03!*2+*!*2):)!(3!0&!343*)5+*('!6(+3!6)*E))0!} 7+:*('(7+0*3!E2&!'&57,)*)-!*2)!N/)3*(&00+(:)!&0,(0)!+0-!*2&3)!/3(0?!*2)!7+7):!7)0'(,! 5&-+,(*4!:)?+:-(0?!*2)!A)4!.+:(+6,)3![3),;B)3*))5S!'&7(0?!);;('+'4S!7):')(.)-!6+::():3S! '&00)'*)-0)33\#!

Table 2. Dates and procedure of the quantitative data collection.

Parts of the Data used in this thesis. The three empirical papers that constitute this dissertation draw on questionnaires and interviews of youth who participated in the project. None of the three papers involve a longitudinal design; all are cross-sectional studies. The first and second papers draw only on questionnaire data. Paper one is based on the first data collection (April-May 2012) only with PVS and municipality participants while the second paper is based on data collected the second year (May-July 2013) in the three institutions. The third paper combines quantitative data (from all participants in the project) and qualitative data (from a small PVS sub-sample). Participants’ detailed descriptions are provided in each paper.

The first and second papers draw on questionnaire data to examine the role of groups and ingroup connectedness as a psychological resource associated with positive outcomes at

Waves Date Data collection Participants

04-05. 2012 Data collection in PVS (organized class sessions) >c%1!"=T Wave 1 (2012)

N= 707

Questionnaires sent to more than 800 employees and apprentices affiliated to the Municipality (ML)

ML : 230 10. 2012 Data collection in HS (organized class sessions with 4th

and 5th year students)

HS : 340

Wave 2 (2013) N= 521

419 started in 2012 102 started in 2013

05. 2013 Organized class sessions in PVS (old and new participants)

PVS : 49 old + 102 new 07. 2013 Questionnaires sent to PVS who were not present during

the class sessions, and to HS and ML participants

ML :163, HS : 207 Complementary

questionnaire

08. 2013 Complementary questionnaire sent to PVS participants PVS : 15 (N= 175) 12. 2013 Complementary questionnaire sent to HS and ML

participants HS : 79, ML : 81 Wave 3 (2014) N= 484 357 started in 2012 27 started in 2013 100 started in 2014

05. 2014 Organized class sessions in PVS (old and new participants)

PVS : 52 old + 100 new Questionnaires sent to PVS participants who were not

present during the class sessions, and to HS and ML participants

ML : 137 HS :195

the personal level (coping and well-being, paper 1 and 2), and the societal level (social change commitment and collective efficacy, paper 2). The third paper combines quantitative and qualitative analyses of experiences of structural disadvantage in the service of a better understanding of the processes through which experienced disadvantage can create an orientation toward groupness, and how this can in turn change the coping experience.