The START project — Surfing Transition to Adulthood: Resources and Timing — is hosting an Early-Career Researchers Session at its final conference on 4 November 2026 at the University of Turin, dedicated to new empirical contributions on youth transitions.
In recent decades, the transition to adulthood has become increasingly prolonged, destandardized, and socially differentiated. How do adolescents and emerging adults form expectations about education, work, family formation, and residential independence? And how are these shaped by cultural values, socialization processes, and contextual opportunities and constraints? The conference session invites PhD students and early-career researchers to engage with these questions through original empirical analyses.
To support emerging scholars, the START research team will make the survey dataset available early to selected participants. The START student-parent survey is based on a nationally representative sample of 2,538 Italian adolescents and 812 parents, and includes measures on value orientations, life course expectations, intergenerational dynamics, and more. The questionnaire includes items drawn from the European Values Study, the European Social Survey, and the ISSP, making it well-suited for comparative research.
Submissions should include an abstract (max. 2,500 characters) and a short bio (max. 1,000 characters). Only abstracts that explicitly propose the use of the START dataset will be considered. The authors of the most promising contributions will be invited to contribute to an edited volume currently under preparation.
Timeline
| Submission deadline | 15 May 2026 |
| Notification of acceptance | 15 June 2026 |
| Dataset provided to selected participants | 22 June 2026 |
More information can be found here: https://edu.nl/uhxt3
Or apply directly here: https://edu.nl/wngda