Youth, Emotions and Daily Life: Comparing the Pandemic and the Post Covid Era

The contribution aims to examine which role emotions have in life trajectories and how the post-pandemic socio-emotional implications are affecting youth transitions to adulthood in Italy. Focusing on adolescents and young people the Covid-19 pandemic, the role of emotions in the management of daily life and in the construction of coping strategies in Italy is an aspect that has received limited attention in social research and there have been only a few studies on this topic for the selected context. The contribution then focuses on the results of a mixed method research (survey and qualitative interviews), by analyzing the dominant emotions experienced by young people in the Italian context during the pandemic (2020–2021) and in the post-pandemic (2021–2024), focusing on the role in life trajectories strategies and on the key distinctions between and within young adults and adolescents. The study has reconstructed the complex emotional experience that young people and adolescents have lived through both during and after the pandemic, highlighting important distinctions between and within the two age groups. The research finally highlights what life strategies were adopted to live the pandemic period and what are the projections of young people for the future looking at the emotions it evokes, the goals that have been set, and the values of being an adult. Young people have reacted and continue to react to disruptive collective events by developing new strategies for managing emotions and important life skills for adulthood transition.