Accompanying study Viennese youth support

The aim of the study was to accompany the project Viennese youth support scheme by conducting scientific analysis. Besides a profound data analysis of young people, who (1) are registered as unemployed with the Public Employment Service in Austria and (2) receive means-tested minimum income (BMS), the service of L&R includes organisational support and the evaluation of planned scientific accompanying measures.

The study focuses on the entire group of young PES registered persons and means-tested minimum recipients. The focus was placed on three age groups:

• People from 15 to 17 years old
• People from 18 to 20 years old
• People from 21 to 24

Three subgroups close to employment were examined in more detail:

• PES preregistered persons without BMS benefits
• PES registered persons with BMS benefits/ BMS recipient with PES registration
• Business related BMS recipients without PES registration

With regard to the research logic – i.e. the delimitation of the observed subgroups – this study moves in the field of tension between two traditions:

• In the area of BMS, concern logics are often applied, mostly on an annual basis. An undeniable advantage of this approach is the resource-saving approach in the analysis, a disadvantage is the drifting apart of annual stock figures and key date stock figures with the accumulation of short-term change processes.
• Analyses with PES reference or in the social insurance environment, on the other hand, frequently select the study population on the basis of continuous month-end deadlines, which in turn are condensed into annual average results in a second step. This logic is undoubtedly more computationally intensive and, in terms of results, a little more abstract than the annual impact logic. One advantage, however, is that even with extensive change processes and fragmentation, it is still possible to draw conclusions about the current status quo (as of the reporting date). Within the framework of this study, the selection of the study groups is based on the logic described in second place, the two-stage procedure that ultimately generates annual average data.

The following questions were answered:

• What is the extent of the three subgroups described above, what changes did the extent undergo over time, and what are the characteristics of the subgroups?
• What types or risk groups can be identified for the three subgroups examined and here again for the three age groups described above? In particular, the degree and type of overlap between PES registerd persons and BMS registered persons in the sense of type formation was worked out for the subgroup of PES registerd persons with BMS registered persons/ BMS registered persons with PES benefits.
• In the sense of the third subgroup, it was asked how many young people are considered by the social services to be close to employment, but do not have PES registration status, and how the characteristics of this group are provided over time.
• What support services do the sub-groups receive?
• Furthermore, a number of characteristics and indicators were included in the analysis of the three subgroups, the age groups and the type/risk groups.