Fostering digital capabilities among youth

Digital technology is now an integral part of our daily lives, especially in highly digitalized societies like Norway. It plays a crucial role in various aspects of working life and accessing welfare services. However, we lack sufficient knowledge about how young people in vulnerable situations, such as those who are not in school, not employed, or not in training (NEET), harness digital technologies for their benefit. While Norway has a smaller percentage of NEETs compared to other European countries, this group of youth in Norway tend to experience poorer mental health and have lower levels of education. Among youth without a high school degree, migrants are overrepresented. This increases the likelihood of them remaining in a long-term NEET situation. The primary goal of DIGcapabilities project is to identify how social background and factors that increases the chance of being disconnected from school and work influence the practices, strategies and difficulties this group of youth face when trying to get favorable results from their digital practices. The project will investigate these digital practices within and across their social environments. In DIGcapabilities project, we will investigate three key aspects of a) how these youths make sense of their daily digital practices; b) the digital practices of these youths within the context of their family's daily dynamics; c) their interaction with welfare services through digital channels. Through these steps, we aim to develop a methodological tool that can enhance our understanding of the digital disparities experienced by migrant NEET youth. This tool will then enable us to offer recommendations to public actors and policymakers on how to improve digital inclusion for these youths.

In contemporary societies, increasingly diversified with multiplied social, economic, and cultural variations, digital technology is more than ever fused together with and through daily life. There is a pressing need to reduce socio-digital inequalities in the context of a highly digitalized working life and public services. At the same time, there is a knowledge gap about how disadvantaged youth, such as those in NEET situations (not in education, employment, or training), can take advantage of their own digital practices. Through four interconnected work packages, this study contributes to filling this gap. It investigates ways in which migrant NEET youth (15-29 years old) employ strategies and experience struggles to reach favorable outcomes from their digital practices in: a) the migrant NEET youths’ everyday life (WP1), b) a family context (WP2), and c) interaction with public welfare services (WP3). Insights from the three ecosystems will be synthesized in WP4. This will result in an intersectional methodological tool for better understanding of what socio-digital inequality signifies for migrant NEET youth, enabling policy brief and recommendations to public sectors and policy makers for facilitating digital inclusion of migrant NEETs. The main objective of the DIGcapabilities project is to identify how social and contextual backgrounds, such as factors increasing the risks of disconnection from education and employment create patterns of strategies and struggles in reaching favorable outcomes from their digital practices, such as interaction with peers and extended social networks or welfare services that are reconfigured in digital age.