The Conceptual Framework: Historical Context and Human Development

The transition to adulthood implies two processes of initiation into adult roles. One is connected with family roles, the second with work roles. The survival of humankind is dependent upon both. Biological reproduction is tied to some kind of family role; physical survival is tied to economic subsistence in some kind of work role.

These transition processes not only are preconditions of intergenerational continuity, but also they are, more importantly, highly variable and context specific. This became obvious for the first time in the research of cultural anthropologists that demonstrated the great variation in these transition processes from culture to culture. The context specificity has been shown even more impressively in sociohistorical research, which also helped to illuminate the social conditions generating the phenomenon of youth unemployment. It is a very late product of industrialization and marks only in this context a temporary or permanent failure of a regular transition to the adult work role. Today, it constitutes a problem for society, as well as a problem for a productive individual human development.

This way of analyzing youth unemployment is characteristic of the even more general approach of considering the whole human life span as embedded in a changing historical context. To take sociohistorical context factors seriously when analyzing determinants of human development is by now a well-established perspective (Elder, 1980; Elder, Pavalko, & Hastings, 1991; Lerner, 1991; Modell & Goodman, 1990; Ryder, 1965; Stewart & Healy, 1989).