Youth As a Complex Issue: Notes on Brazilian Socio-Demographic Characteristics

Youth as a category is tied to a complex network of relationships as occurs in any given society. According to Sposito (2000), youth may not be categorized with any sort of precision, but this imprecision is exactly what makes defining youth relevant. The concept of youth is wrapped up in a complex representation thus it is understood in different ways and varies between different regions and/or countries. With this in mind, certain definitions will be taken into consideration so as to define the group that we consider as young in our study. Youth is a category that encompasses multiple social issues and brings may challenges for any society in terms of the kind of attention given to this socially defined segment. This concern links the study of youth with debates about major social and economic problems, since society still projects its future on youth, as part of a development ideal. In this paper we aim to analyze the general characteristics of the young population in Brazilian rural and urban areas, showing the differences among them by sex, education, working conditions, as well as the rates of violence and crime that draw a specific scenario for Brazil. The National Household Sample Surveys of 1989 and 2011 provide the principal data used in our study.