Youth Transition and Social Welfare: A Comparative Study of Japan, Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and Norway

This book is based on a five-year joint project involving a comparative study of youth transitions and social policy/security in Japan and Europe. It uses a comparative model embedded in insights from previous research on youth transition, and builds on comparative country case studies from Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany, Norway, and Switzerland. Starting from the increasingly problematic youth transitions in Japan, this book focuses on young people’s transitions to adulthood in Japan and four European countries. This book examines how country-specific institutions and cultural norms create and resolve transition risks in the respective countries, taking into consideration aspects of social policy/security.

Chapter 5 is available open access under a CreativeCommons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Professor Akio Inui is Professor emeritus of education at Tokyo Metropolitan University, Japan. His current research interest is youth transitions and youth policies, and he is the leader of the research project ‘Leaving home and family formation in Japan and Europe: The impact of social security/welfare policy’. He has published several articles of comparative study of youth transition based on cooperative work with researchers from the United Kingdom and Europe. He was also the secretary general of the Japanese Educational Research Association, and Editor-in-Chief of The Japanese Journal of Educational Research.

Dr Andy Biggart is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences, Education and Social Work, at Queen’s University Belfast, United Kingdom. His research interests are focused around educational disadvantage and inequalities, including policies and interventions that aim to tackle educational underachievement among children and young people. Recently, as either Principal Investigator or as Co-investigator, he has been involved with a number of large-scale randomised control trial studies of educational interventions. His other research has focused on young people’s transitions from education to employment and early school leaving. He has also studied youth transitions from a comparative perspective together with European and Japanese colleagues, and published internationally on this topic.

Professor Christian Imdorf is Professor of Sociology of Education at the Leibniz University Hannover, Germany. He holds a doctoral degree from the University of Fribourg and a postdoctoral lecture qualification in Sociology (Habilitation) from the University of Basel, Switzerland. His previous positions include SNSF Research Professorships in Sociology at the University of Basel (2011-2015), and at the University of Bern (2015-2017), as well as Associate Professorship of Sociology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) at the Department of Sociology and Political Science in 2018. Since 2025 he holds the ERA Chair 'Progressing Promising Skills to Work in Bulgaria' at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. His research interests include, amongst others, school-to-work transitions, gender segregation in education, inclusive access to higher education, employment insecurity and labour market integration in Europe, as well as education and conventions.

Professor Dr. Birgit Reissig studied Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Leipzig, Germany, with a Ph.D. in Social Science. She is head of the branch office of the German Youth Institute and head of the Youth Transition Department. She is also Professor at the University of Applied Science Leipzig, Germany. Her research interests include school-to-work-transition of young people, and processes of social exclusion and perceived stress of young students. She leads a number of projects such as the ‘Transition Panel of the German Youth Institute’, ‘Non-formal Education in Adolescence’ and ‘Agencies for Municipal Education Management’. She has published a number of articles on these topics.

Jan Skrobanek is Professor of Sociology at the University of Bergen, Norway. His research interests are focused around school-to-work transitions of vulnerable youth from a global perspective, ethnic identity, discrimination and ethnicisation, social, cultural and economic inequalities, as well as youth subcultural orientations and resistance practices. He has been involved in a variety of major international research projects focusing on youth integration and inequality, as well as educational and labour market policies and interventions for tackling and mitigation social inequality.