Students and friends: classe trajectories and sociability networks

Abstract

The article describes some concepts, fields of analytical incidence and results from the Permanent Observatory of the University Youth, started in 1985. First, the authors argue on the student's class characterization, emphasize the benefits of a wider field of class analysis by means of concepts such as the social trajectory, the relations of sociability and networks of social relationships. Furthermore, they attempt to apply these concepts to a set of students attending 14 university courses. Then, they present the analysises concerning two important segments of both the systems of dispositions and cultural configurations of students: images of their position in the social scale and patterns of personal orientation. Finally, they make some considerations on the operativeness of the class concepts and the relationship between social structures and cultural structures.