Social condition of the Portuguese youth

Abstract

This work is the result of the first phase in a undergoing research concerning the social behaviour of youth in Portugal. As a matter of fact, it would be necessary, before studying the behaviour of young people, to understand what youth is under the social point of view, mainly whenever young people have suffered a growing processus of social marginalization, since they are the principal victims of the growing unemployment. They have also suffered the consequences of the consecutive changes in the educational system and it is not surprising if they are most by involved in a higher rate of criminality and delinquency. On the other side the modernization of the family, in its multiple dimensions, has modified the traditional functions of the family in a significant way, deeply acting upon the insertion capacity of young people in the adult world. But, at the same time, Portuguese young people have gradually been integrated, at the cultural level, by means of the intensification of the consumption mechanism. Most of the Portuguese young people are thus marginalized as producers but they are integrated as consumers.