Negotiating Uncertainty: Finnish Female University Students' Experiences on Transition from Education to Work

Abstract

The research at hand observes closely the education-to-work transitions of eleven Finnish female university students, who were interviewed in Autumn 2008 for a more extensive research on processes of achieving adulthood in contemporary Finnish society. The interviewees’ transitional processes are studied as told experiences, and the focus is in the subjective meanings the respondents give to education and work. The research aims to illustrate how these meanings intertwine with the respondents’ conceptions of adulthood, and to observe how these conceptions relate to contemporary social conditions that have rendered institutionalized biographical transitions fragmented and heterogeneous. The intention is to try to understand the respondents’ articulated experiences by placing them within wider societal context, which structures individual life choices. The interview data has been analyzed using central elements applied from Grounded Theory and qualitative content analysis. The societal context of the research is the contemporary, early 21st century Finnish society, where central social institutions, including education system, labour market and family are undergoing dramatic changes that affect individuals’ biographical designs. Theoretically the research is situated close to the recent theorizations on life course and biography in highly individualized and increasingly global risk society.

Asiasanat:Key words: uncertainty, education-to-work transition, university graduates, Finnish society, transition to adulthood, choice biography