The development of conceptions of unemployment among adolescents

Although children's economic concepts and young people's experience of unemployment are being increasingly investigated, as yet there is very little work on adolescents' understanding of unemployment. The research that has been carried out in this area is not developmental research. In this study children's ideas about unemployment were investigated by interviewing 40 children from two age groups (11 to 12 years and 15 to 16 years). The children were asked to define unemployment, to indicate if and how unemployed people differed from those with a job and asked if they would like to be unemployed. The results showed that, with age, understanding of unemployment became more abstract and more global. Compared with the younger children, the adolescents offered more societal and fatalistic explanations for unemployment, saw the unemployed as fundamentally similar to the employed and regarded the principal undesirable effects of unemployment as social-psychological rather than economic.