Introduction

Management and scientific council

Direction: Sebastian Bastianelli

Scientific Council: Luigi Guerra ; Raimondo Pavarin

Description and institutional objectives

The "Permanent Observatory on the Condition of Youth" Study Center, established at the Department of Human Sciences of the University of the Republic of San Marino, aims to serve as a permanent center for analyzing the constantly evolving reality of contemporary youth, with a specific but not exclusive focus on the San Marino region.

In particular, the Centre aims to:

• develop studies and research aimed at providing the knowledge base necessary to activate effective policies in the sector
• design interventions to qualify policies and projects aimed at the youth world that involve all public, civil community and market agencies active in the sector
• promote widespread knowledge of issues affecting the youth world among institutions and citizens as a whole
• carry out training activities, aimed at the school, training and social health sectors, through the creation of courses and teaching activities aimed at acquiring specific educational skills

The Center bases its planning on the understanding that the range of stakeholders and types of interventions currently underway are highly diverse and address youth issues in a completely unrelated manner, from very different perspectives, both in terms of their approach philosophy and operational methods. Most interventions are episodic in nature, lacking targeted planning that allows for a systematic and long-term response to all age groups and all regional areas. Furthermore, in most interventions, young people are seen more as recipients than as active participants in the experiences, and only a few projects involve families in the planning, management, and evaluation of activities.

Based on this awareness, the Center intends to build its research and third mission activities according to logics that allow it to provide the specific contribution of scientific tools for interpreting and designing interventions aimed at youth.

The Centre's theoretical guidelines are based on the following references:

1. The choice to interpret the current reality of youth within the current context of widespread consumerism and the all-encompassing presence of new digital communication environments, accompanied by insecurity and disorientation about the future caused by war, the environmental crisis, the pandemic, and the resulting dereliction of responsibility and the weakening of psychological and motivational resources.
2. The choice to identify strategies of empowerment, self-help, and early assumption of responsibility as the elements that can potentially counteract youthful disorientation in a context that appears to tend to prolong the protective attitudes typical of early childhood education.

The operational guidelines of the Study Center's activity are divided into three main work directions:

• Knowledge qualification activities (they respond to the need to systematically monitor the evolution of the youth world, its languages, its fashions, its value system, etc.)
• Participation enhancement activities (respond to the need to involve all public institutions and civil society entities, young people and their families to take an active part in
  projects aimed at the youth world)
• Planning and implementation activities of training interventions (they respond to the need to build specific professional figures locally and to increase the competence of parents,
  association workers and all adults with a significant role towards young people).