The Effects of Unemployment on the Social Isolation of Young Adults with Precarious Employment Trajectories

In all southern European countries, the personal network of connections is a source of information and support for labour market integration, especially among young people. Existing empirical studies on this issue show that the contacts that have been made in the employment sphere offer the most useful support in finding employment. These contacts, however, are the ones that are most easily lost when a person is unemployed. In fact, the literature has shown that a long period of unemployment, which could be equated with exclusion from employment, causes a negative spiral of social isolation, so that unemployment leads to a loss of connections, and this loss of connections makes it difficult to return to employment, thus reinforcing the unemployed person's exclusion from employment. In this paper we study the employment trajectories of a sample of 100 young adults between 25 and 39 living in the city of Barcelona with a strong presence of unemployment in their trajectories. The analysis deals with sequential qualitative and quantitative data to analyse the influence of different characteristics of unemployment (duration of unemployment spells, frequency of unemployment, time of the trajectory in which unemployment was suffered) on the characteristics of the personal network of contacts. The qualitative data is particularly important, as it makes possible to identify the reasons and mechanisms that lead to this loss of contacts in the personal network of connections.