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YOUTH STUDY
ROMANIA
2018/2019
THE FRIEDRICH-EBERT-STIFTUNG
The Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) is the oldest political foundation
in Germany, with a rich tradition in social democracy dating back
to 1925. The work of our political foundation revolves around the
core ideas and values of social democracy – freedom, justice and
solidarity. This is what binds us to the principles of social democ-
racy and free trade unions.
With our international network of offices in more than 100
countries, we support a policy for peaceful cooperation and human
rights, promote the establishment and consolidation of democratic,
social and constitutional structures and work as pioneers for free
trade unions and a strong civil society. We are actively involved in
promoting a social, democratic and competitive Europe in the
process of European integration.
YOUTH STUDIES SOUTHEAST EUROPE 2018/2019:
“FES Youth Studies Southeast Europe 2018/2019” is an interna-
tional youth research project carried out simultaneously in ten
countries in Southeast Europe: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina,
Bulgaria, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Romania,
Serbia and Slovenia. The main objective of the surveys has been
to identify, describe and analyse attitudes of young people and
patterns of behaviour in contemporary society.
The data was collected in early 2018 from more than 10,000
respondents aged 14–29 in the above-mentioned countries who
participated in the survey. A broad range of issues were ad-
dressed, including young peoples’ experiences and aspirations in
different realms of life, such as education, employment, political
participation, family relationships, leisure and use of information
and communications technology, but also their values, attitudes
and beliefs.
Findings are presented in ten national and one regional study
and its accompanying policy papers, which have been published
in both English and the respective national languages.
YOUTH STUDY
ROMANIA
2018/2019
Gabriel Badescu, Daniel Sandu, Daniela Angi, Carmen Greab
1 Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 3
2 Socio-economic context ..................................................................................................... 7
3 Family, society and social trust ..................................................................................... 21
4 Education and employment ........................................................................................... 37
5 Lifestyle and leisure ............................................................................................................ 47
6 Religion and spirituality .................................................................................................... 53
7 Democracy and sociopolitical attitudes ................................................................... 61
8 Conclusions ............................................................................................................................. 75
References .................................................................................................................................................. 78
Footnotes ................................................................................................................................................... 79
List of Figures ............................................................................................................................................. 80
List of Tables ............................................................................................................................................... 81
3
Why are we interested in the attitudes and behaviour of young
people? Youth are important to study because age has been
shown to be a strong predictor of a wide range of beliefs,
knowledge and actions, and because teenagers and young
adults tend to change faster when external conditions change.
But also knowing what people do at a young age is important
for the future. Research has, for instance, shown that young
people who participated in the Vietnam protests are also more
likely to protest later (Jennings, 2002). Not all types of behav-
iours are predicated to stay stable over a lifetime, however.
Winston S. Churchill supposedly once observed that anyone
who was not a liberal at 20 years of age had no heart, while
anyone who was still a liberal at 40 had no head. With small
variations, this saying has been attributed to Benjamin Disraeli,
King Oscar II of Sweden, George Bernard Shaw, Georges Clem-
enceau, and many others.1 It captures the widely shared belief
that individuals change their political and social views as they
grow older, but also the fact that there is a strong life-cycle
pattern. To what extent are these views supported by empirical
research? It would appear that it depends. While some authors
claim that adolescents’ attitudinal patterns remain relatively
stable throughout the life cycle, others argue that answers pro-
vided by adolescents in political surveys have but a limited pre-
dictive value when it comes to their future attitudes and behav-
iour. Marc Hooghe and Britt Wilkenfeld have tackled this
question by examining political trust, attitudes toward immi-
grants’ rights and voting behaviour in eight European countries,
and found that country patterns with regard to political trust
and attitudes toward immigrant rights are already well estab-
lished by the age of 14. Yet, they found less indications for sta-
bility in the relation between intention to vote and actual voting
behaviour.
Although the persistence of adolescents’ political attitudes
and behaviours into adulthood is a perennial concern in research
on developmental psychology, the empirical research has inher-
ent limitations. One of the problems is that only a very small
proportion of youth studies include non-Western societies. An-
other limitation stems from the fact that the past contexts of
youth socialisation tend to differ from current ones, which means
that longitudinal studies with a longer timespan before first and
last observations, which are ideal from a methodological point
of view, are likely to suffer from obsolescence.
This study aims to address both types of problems. It is based
on survey data on a sample that is representative for 15-to-29-
year-old residents of Romania, and is part of a broad comparative
research that includes nine other countries from southeast Eu-
rope, an under-researched and overlooked region with only
scarce systematic data and analyses: Albania, Bosnia and Herze-
govina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Ser-
bia and Slovenia. The analyses are structured by four categories
of topics: (1) Education and employment, (2) Socioeconomic
status and mobility, (3) Socio-political attitudes and political en-
gagement, (4) Family life and leisure time.
At the same time, Romania in 2018 presents several charac-
teristics that amply justify its importance for studying its young
citizens. First, it is a society that faces significant democratic risks.
There is a virtual consensus that Europe has slipped into a “dem-
ocratic recession” in which new and old democracies alike have
fallen victim to a “powerful authoritarian undertow” (Diamond
2014, Mudde 2013). In Europe, the governments of Hungary,
Poland, Slovakia, and Austria have incorporated nationalist and
neo-right policies that are seeping into their political institutions
(Greskovits 2015).
Second, the rise of illiberal politics coincides, on a global
level, with growing income inequality (Piketty 2014; Keeley 2015),
and the literature maintains that inequality is harmful to demo-
cratic governance in both developed and post-transitional polit-
ical systems (Fukuyama, Diamond, and Plattner 2012). Romania
has not been immune to pressures toward illiberal democratic
governance in the face of economic inequality. Whereas the
European Union has seen relative stability in income distribution
with an average Gini coefficient hovering near 31.0 for a decade,
1
INTRODUCTION
4YOUTH STUDY ROMANIA 2018/2019
Romania has averaged a Gini coefficient of 35.2 over the same
period, with the latest figure being 37.4 in 2015 (European Com-
mission 2017). During the 1990s, the Romanian Gini coefficient
level was on par with Sweden at 22.7. Using the income quintile
ratio (S80/S20) as an alternative measure, Romania (= 7.2) is well
above the European Union average (= 5.2) and one of the most
unequal countries among the 28 members.
Third, poverty and inequality are even more severe in the
case of Romanian youth (Bădescu and Sum 2015). The young
people neither in employment nor in education and training
(NEET) indicator, which corresponds to the percentage of the
population of a given age group and sex who are not employed
and not involved in further education or training, shows that
Romanian youth is facing one of the most difficult transition from
education to work among the EU countries (Figure 1.1.).
The Romanian case is unusual in that it displays the second
greatest differences between levels of education (after Malta),
with Romanian’s NEET rate for those persons having an interme-
diate level of education being 6 times higher than the one for
those persons with a high level of education. Also, Romania
exhibits one of the biggest differences in rates between cities
and rural areas, with a gap of 12.6 percentage points.
Finally, another question regards the intensity and efficiency
of youth political participation. The paradox of a society that has
had the second highest growth rate among the EU countries
over the last 20 years, but whose young citizens are among those
facing the most precarious conditions, can be explained to some
extent by a very unusual age distribution, the result of a 1966
law that banned abortion, resulting in double the number of
new-borns for a couple of years, and low fertility and high em-
igration after 1990. Data provided in Figure 1.2. show that per-
centages for youth are much smaller than those for middle-age
citizens, especially those persons between 40 and 50 years old.
A lower percentage of the total population means less voice,
which is then reflected in policies that tend to ignore this section
of the population. Youth political participation has the potential
to amplify this voice and, by doing so, to compensate for the
demographic disadvantage. Yet, young generations are often de-
picted as disengaged from politics, apathetic and lacking interest
in public matters (Quintelier 2007). An alternative view is that the
young are not necessarily less active than the older generations,
but what differs is their preference for specific types and channels
of participation (Hooghe & Boonen 2016; Stolle & Hooghe 2005).
Such preferences may be rooted in the specific understanding that
young people have about citizenship and their means, as citizens,
to influence public decisions (Dalton 2008). The growth of Internet
communication and social networks provides new opportunities
for youth to become active online or to reinforce their offline
participation with Internet-mediated activism (Vissers & Stolle
2014). In addition, involvement in contentious forms of political
participation is an important area where the young are particu-
larly visible (Burean & Bădescu 2014).
This study aims to make a contribution in these debates by
focusing on the case of young Romanians. By evaluating their
attitudes, norms, values and behaviour, we will assess to what
extent generational replacement is a key process driving social and
political change, and what it portends for the future of democra-
cy in Romania.
FIGURE 1.1: Young people neither in employment nor in education and training, 15 to 29 years of age
(NEET rates)
2008 200 9 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017
Romania Slovakia, Finland, Sweden, United Kingdom, Slovenia, Luxembourg, Hungary, Malta, Netherlands,
Austri a, Poland, Por tugal, Greece, Sp ain, France, Croa tia, Italy, Cypr us, Latvia , Lithuania, Eur opean Union,
Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republich, Denmark, Germany, Estonia, Ireland
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
Source: Euro stat (edat_l fse_20)
5INTRODUCTION
FIGURE 1.2: Resident population by age and urban / rural residence as of 1 January 2017
240 000
230 000
220 000
210 00 0
200 000
190 000
180 000
170 000
160 000
150 000
140 000
130 000
120 000
110 000
100 000
90 000
80 000
70 000
60 000
50 000
40 000
30 000
20 000
10 000
0
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 22 24 26 28 30 32 34 36 38 4 0 42 44 46 48 50 52 54 56 5 8 60 62 64 66 68 70 72 74 76 78 80 82 8 4
Urban Rural
Source: National Institute for Statistics
7
2
SOCIO-ECONOMIC
CONTEXT
The study of young people is important because it gives us an
idea of a country’s future, but also of how a country treats its
most vulnerable at present. The topic is important not only in
order to obtain a picture of existing disparities between youth,
but also because, as mainstream academic research shows both
in Romania and other countries, the socio-economic levels of
young people as they are developing is one of the most influen-
tial factors in the description of their economic, social and politi-
cal development in the course of their lives (Jennings and Niemi
1974; Niemi, Hepburn, and Chapman 2000; Chetty et al. 2014).
Today’s socio-economic context may greatly influence not only
the beliefs and attitudes of today, but also those of the future.
More precisely, research on socialisation has shown that the
socio-economic context in which young people find themselves
during the “impressionable years”2 will largely determine many of
the attitudes and beliefs that they will hold for the rest of their
lives (Neundorf and Smets 2017). For this reason, social mecha-
nisms that connect certain social, economic or political beliefs to
the broader societal context or individual traits also need to be
identified for Romania. A more efficient understanding of such
socialisation effects could contribute to developing a more cogent
answer to the age-old question of what makes Romania different.
The generation under study here is also relevant to post-commu-
nist Romania and its inherent institutional and societal transfor-
mation. The oldest respondents incorporated in our study were
born in 1989, at the very end of the communist regime, while the
youngest were born in 2004, within sight of Romania’s accession
to NATO and the European Union.
From this perspective, the general study of young people and
society provides us with two important benefits: 1. A better un-
derstanding of the effect of age, or how respondents at a certain
age interact with the socio-economic context and 2. A cohort or
generational effect, or how a certain generation of respondents
who were exposed to similar instances of socialisation may have
developed a certain set of attitudes or social beliefs.
As research in this field is still relatively in its infancy in Ro-
mania, this chapter aims to explore some of the mechanisms
identified in the broader socialisation literature in the Romanian
context, such as the effects of subjective and objective meas-
urements of welfare, fears and hopes, religiosity and ultimately
the extremely relevant subject of migration. Seeing that Romania
has been one of the countries most exposed to migratory outflow
in recent years in the European Union, the study of youth and
the determinants of migration is one of the more relevant topics
of research in the country.
DIFFERENT TYPES OF WELFARE IN
ROMANIA
The survey includes multiple measurements of financial welfare,
one of them relative, focusing on a personal comparison with a
perceived average, while another one focuses on a Eurostat-like
definition of family-level welfare by type of expenses.
As expected, the relative indicator has an almost perfect nor-
mal distribution, with most people placing themselves at the av-
erage level, while the family welfare indicator suggests that more
than 80 per cent of families consider themselves to have enough
money to be able to cover expenses for bills, food and clothing.
Apart from these indicators, our research also offers a more
objective indicator of possession of goods, which is also different
from the above two indicators. This indicator is inspired by the
Eurostat measurement for material deprivation and measures how
many of the following goods the respondent’s household
8YOUTH STUDY ROMANIA 2018/2019
possesses: 1. A house or an apartment; 2. A mobile phone; 3. A
personal computer; 4. A home Internet connection; 5. A bicycle;
6. A motorcycle; 7. Air conditioning; 8. A dishwasher; 9. A wash-
ing machine; 10. An automobile.3
The distribution of goods across the population seems to be
relatively uniform, with about 20 per cent of all people between
the ages of 14 and 29 living in households with less than five of
the goods queried. The goods indicator is even less correlated to
either of the previous ones, displaying correlation levels around
0.16, which indicates that the self-assessment of one’s financial
affluence is connected to more than just ownership of goods.
Instead, there’s a feeling of poverty that is more related to an
inherent comparison with other people in the community, as well
as social origin and aspirations.
The differences between the two can be clearly seen in Figure
2.1. We can observe that objective access to goods tends to de-
crease with the passage of time, as young people move out of
their family’s household, where they have benefited from the
welfare of the family, to start their own household or family. The
decrease in access to goods with the passing of time appears to
be mildest in Bucharest, which is also by far the richest region of
the country and also a major university centre of the country. Youth
from other regions tend to move to the largest cities in the region
or toward Bucharest, thereby making people who stay behind
after a certain age appear significantly less well-off.
On the flipside, subjective estimations of welfare seem to
be more stable across time/stages of maturity, which also un-
derpins the idea that the subjective estimation of welfare is
connected to more than just immediate access to material
goods. The one exception to this rule seems to also be Bucha-
rest, which exhibits a greater variation. Still, this variation is not
statistically significant, which could be most easily explained
by the high rate of change in the population of Bucharest, es-
pecially after the age of 20.
Indeed, the strongest driver of these differences in welfare is
not age, but parental education. Regression models indicate with
a high level of significance that young people both of whose
parents have more than a high-school diploma tend to be much
better off, both in subjective and objective terms.
Regarding the factors that drive the difference in levels of
subjective and objective welfare reported, the most important
and constant differentiating factors seem to be the size of the
municipality and parental education of the respondents. The two
may very well be connected, as larger cities tend to attract more
FIGURE 2.1 A: Objective and subjective plotting of welfare by region and age
8
7
6
5
4
14 to 18 23 to 26
Bucaresti Moldova Muntenia Transilvania
19 to 22 27 to 29
Objective estimation of welfare
FIGURE 2.1 B: Objective and subjective plotting of welfare by region and age
4,0
3,5
3,0
2,5
2,0
14 to 18 23 to 26
Bucaresti Moldova Muntenia Transilvania
19 to 22 27 to 29
Subjective estimation of welfare
9SOCIO-ECONOMIC CONTEXT
educated people, therefore accounting for both the pull factor for
educated parents and better access to goods, respectively a more
positive estimation of subjective welfare. There are some things
to note in this relationship, though. While parental education has
effects on both varieties of welfare, these ef fects are independent
of each other, as confirmed by regression analysis. In other words,
it is likely that parental education itself has two types of independ-
ent effects on the estimation of a respondent’s welfare: 1. More
educated parents tend to own more goods, but also 2. More
educated parents socialise their children to feel better off, inde-
pendently of how many goods they own (Jennings and Niemi
2014; Chetty et al. 2011).
Another interesting dynamic factor to observe is the one per-
taining to the effect of age. Advances in age seem to have a
negative effect on objective welfare, but a small positive effect
on subjective welfare (which is also significant in regression anal-
yses). More simply put, while older respondents tend to own few-
er goods, especially as they are starting a new household, they
also seem to see themselves as being less poor the more inde-
pendent they become.
Another extremely important finding illustrated in these re-
sults is the fact that poverty (both objective and subjective) seems
to be characteristic not only of rural areas (population under
5,000 people), but also of small and very small towns (both
5 – 10,000 people and 10 – 100,000 people).4 While this finding
is not particularly novel, especially in research concerning pov-
erty in former communist countries, it does confirm that anti-pov-
erty measures are needed not only in rural Romania, but also in
smaller towns, many of which have been artificially upgraded
from village status to achieve a higher rate of urbanisation (Eu-
ropean Commission 2017; The World Bank 2018; Tesliuc, Grigo-
ras, and Stanculescu 2015). While about 25 per cent of the pop-
ulation of 14-to-29-year-olds live in villages with fewer than 5000
inhabitants, another 37 per cent of this segment of the
Albania
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Bulgaria
Croatia
Kosovo
Montenegro
Romania
Serbia
Slovenia
0 % 10 % 20 % 30 % 40 % 50 % 60 % 70 % 80 % 9 0 % 100 %
FIGURE 2.2 A : Objective and subjective welfare by country
Objective Welfare Representations
0 – 4 Goods 4 – 6 Goods 7 – 8 Goods 9 – 10 G oods
Albania
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Bulgaria
Croatia
Kosovo
Macedonia
Montenegro
Romania
Serbia
Slovenia
0 % 10 % 20 % 30 % 40 % 50 % 60 % 70 % 80 % 9 0 % 100 %
FIGURE 2.2 B: Objective and subjective welfare by country
Subjective Welfare Representations
We barely h ave enough mone y to survive
We have enough money for food and clothes
We can affo rd to buy expen sive things
10 YOUTH STUDY ROMANIA 2018/2019
population live in towns and small cities of between 5000 and
100,000 people.
As we can see in the country-by-country comparison in Figure
2.2., the finding that objective and subjective welfare are not
aligned seems to be generalizable. While respondents from Ro-
mania, Bulgaria and Albania believe themselves to be significant-
ly poorer than respondents from other countries, GDP/capita
figures show that is not the actual case, with Kosovo and Mace-
donia being significantly lower. Clearly, subjective estimations of
welfare go beyond actual economic conditions and are also close-
ly connected to private cultural factors, such as pride and desira-
bility. The tentative hypothesis that subjective representations of
income are related to the country’s inequality level could be seen
as passing the first empirical test, with Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia
and Slovenia ranking exactly according to the most recent devel-
opments of the income quintile share ratio of inequality. More
research into the topic would be necessary to further validate this
hypothesis.
On the other hand, we can also see that plotting of objective
welfare does not fully align with GDP/capita figures, either, al-
though variation seems much less limited in this case.
PERSONAL AND SOCIETY-LEVEL
PERSPECTIVES OF THE FUTURE
Inherent in the discussion about the socio-economic situation of
young people is a discussion about their expectations for the fu-
ture. Here our research identifies three different types of general
expectations: respondents’ expectation about what the future
will bring to them personally, what the future will have to offer
for the country in general and what the future has in store for the
people of Romania. These three different types of expectation
allow us to better understand the dynamics of young people and
their involvement and expectations about the future.
TABLE 2.1: Population-, society- and personal-level
perspectives on the future
How do you see
the economic situ-
ation of Romanian
people in the
future?
How do you see
the future of
Romanian society
in general?
How do you
see your
personal
future?
32 28 4
31 26 16
37 46 80
Data in Table 2.1. show that there is a significant distinction be-
tween the three different perspectives on the future. While
young people believe their personal future will almost certainly
improve, they are less certain when it comes to the future of the
country or the people. This difference, while being a reliable sign
of self-reliance, also translates into apprehension on the part of
young people that their aspirations may push them to leave the
country or, at the very least, become detached from the realities
of the entire Romanian society (Tesliuc, Grigoras, and Stancules-
cu 2015). This finding echoes the well-known economic diagnos-
tic that Romania’s development is unequal, with a few major ur-
ban university centres which have grown at a faster pace than
anywhere else in Europe, and the rest of the country, which has
tended to become poorer, older and is still overly-reliant on agri-
culture or low-productivity industry (Tesliuc et al. 2014; Hanley
2000; Sandu et al. 2004).
Even if most young people expect their future to improve, there
are significant within-group differences, the most notable of which
is connected to one’s educational aspirations. As
Two important factors that influence young people’s expecta-
tions about the future are their subjective incomes and their ages.
People who tend to see themselves as poor and unable to deal
with their expenses are, as expected, significantly less hopeful
about their future. The same holds true for those who are objec-
tively less well-off. As expected, the category least hopeful about
the future is the poorest category. In addition, another differen-
tiating factor in terms of confidence in the future seems to be age.
While young people up to the age of 22 seem more confident
about their future, optimism seems to dwindle with the passage
of time – and dramatically so after the age of entry into the labour
market. Young people between 27 and 29 years of age, while still
generally optimistic, are also on average significantly more tem-
perate in their optimism than younger cohorts.
As we can see from Table 2.2., Romania’s case does not seem
to be unique in the region. Most young people from the countries
studied repor t seeing their personal future to be much better than
the present. What is more, this belief seems even stronger in
countries that are currently in a more desperate situation, such as
Kosovo, Serbia and Montenegro. We see a similar ef fect of current
development on evaluations of the future for the country as a
whole, although – just as in the case of Romania – it seems young
people are much more certain that their own situation will improve
than they are that the overall country’s situation will improve. As
we can see, young people from Albania and Kosovo seem much
more confident that their countries will also fare much better in
the future. The only countries where respondents seem not very
convinced of the future seem to be Slovenia, which is a country
that has already reached Western European economic develop-
ment levels and further development at the same pace seems
unlikely, and Macedonia. While reasons for this reticence toward
Macedonia’s future are likely to be complex, they may also be
connected to the dispute the country has had over its name (at
the time that data was being collected for this survey) with Greece,
which had prevented the small Balkan country from entering NATO
and EU negotiations in the past. Serbia and Bosnia & Herzegovina
seem to also be relatively sceptical about the future of their coun-
tries, for reasons most likely connected to internal and regional
political issues.
11SOCIO-ECONOMIC CONTEXT
TABLE 2.2: Perspectives on personal, national and population-level future by country
Alba-
nia
Bosnia
and
Herze-
govina
Bul-
garia
Croatia Kosovo Monte-
negro
Roma-
nia
Serbia Slove-
nia
Tot al
How do you see your personal future in 10 years?
Worse than now 1,7 3,1 2,1 1,8 2,5 23,5 1,9 2,5 2,4
Same as now 8,8 13,4 14,9 2 7,7 75,9 16 ,2 6,8 12,8 13, 3
Better than now 89,5 83,5 82,9 70,5 90,5 92,1 80,3 91, 3 84,7 84,4
How do you see the future of your country in 10 years?
Worse than now 16,2 19,8 13,7 11,5 9,8 20,7 2 8,1 27,4 37,2 20,3
Same as now 24,4 36,4 28 39,9 20,6 22,5 26,4 28,8 36 ,1 30,3
Better than now 59,4 43,7 58,3 48,6 69,6 56,8 45,6 43,8 26,7 49,5
How do you see the economic future of people from your country?
Worse than now 15,6 21,4 17, 9 17,9 11, 4 23,6 32,1 31,6 26,4 22,4
Same as now 34,4 34,5 34,3 44 31,1 35,2 30,9 41,5 48 36,9
Better than now 50 44,2 47, 8 3 8,1 57,6 41,1 37 26,9 25,6 4 0,7
although we see high levels of satisfaction with one’s education,
respondents also tend to declare themselves critical about the
Romanian educational system, saying it is corrupt and not well
adapted. Self-reported satisfaction in these fields is also relatively
consistent with individualism and detachment from the woes and
problems of broader society. While respondents accept that this
broader society suffers from certain weaknesses, which they
readily identify and criticise, they see themselves as having over-
come these weaknesses to lead a relatively satisfactory life.
For this reason, it is not necessarily surprising that feelings of
satisfaction are not structured by any of the major covariates we
take into account in this report.
THE FEAR FACTOR
Connected to the societal analysis of young people in Romania,
our research has also evaluated the level of fear that respond-
ents have regarding certain issues. These issues were selected
so as to cover a wide array of potential sources of fear, such as:
violence, robbery, sickness, losing employment, terrorism, war,
climate change and pollution, poverty, migrants, social injustice
and corruption.
In Figure 2.3., we have added all of the fears together and
have plotted them according to intensity on an additive scale.
Respondents could answer that they are somewhat afraid, which
yielded a score of 1, or that they were very afraid, which yielded
a score of 2. The graph plots the number of fear points on the
horizontal axis and the percentage of the population on the
vertical axis. Therefore, we can see that we have two groups
that are at the two extremes of the distribution, with approxi-
matively 8 per cent of respondents saying they are not at all
afraid of any of these issues, and approximatively 9 per cent at
DESPITE UNCERTAINTY ABOUT
FUTURE, RESPONDENTS ARE
SATISFIED WITH THINGS
Satisfaction with various elements of life seems to be not only
relatively high, but also relatively uniform. On a scale from 1 to
5, 1 being not at all satisfied and 5 being very satisfied, only 5
per cent of respondents generally rate their satisfaction below
level 3. What is more, most of the response categories have an
average reported satisfaction of around 4 out of a maximum of
5, with the exception of satisfaction with one’s job, where
many respondents were excluded because of lack of employ-
ment or too young age.
TABLE 2.3: Satisfaction with various aspects of life
Score 1 to 5 Score Std. Dev.
Satisfaction with
family life
4,431 0,885
Satisfaction with
education
4,179 0,983
Satisfaction with
friends
4,105 0,940
Satisfaction with
job*
3,928 1,12 5
Satisfaction with
life, in general
4,342 0,808
*if the case
The satisfaction scores seem to be generally high and underpin a
general feeling of personal contentment. Self-reported satisfac-
tion scores generally tend to take into account one’s long-term
acceptance of the country’s social or economic context and a
reductionist perception of one’s own faults. So, for example,
12 YOUTH STUDY ROMANIA 2018/2019
the other extreme of the distribution, saying they are extremely
afraid of each and every one of the issues under query.
The rest of the distribution seems to be relatively bell-shaped,
with a majority of respondents placing themselves at the middle,
in the area of moderate fear for all of the issues in question. It is
important to note at this point that about 70 per cent of the re-
spondents say that they are extremely afraid of at least one of the
eleven items under question.
TABLE 2.4: Individual fear scores and standard deviation
for the population
Variable Score Std. Dev.
Fear of violence 0,85 0,79
Fear of robbery 0,90 0,81
Fear of terrorism 0,92 0,85
Fear of migrants 0,94 0,80
Fear of war 1,01 0,83
Fear of illness 1,12 0,83
Fear of unemployment 1,13 0,81
Fear of pollution/climate change 1,19 0,77
Fear of social injustice 1,29 0,77
Fear of poverty 1,30 0,76
Fear of corruption 1,41 0,76
In terms of the most relevant fears, we can see from Table 2.4.
that the largest such fear is that of corruption, closely followed by
the fear of poverty and social injustice.
THE CORRUPTION ISSUE
The indicators that do show a higher score mark a potential
vulnerability to a politically motivated discourse based on fear.
The strongest fear identified, that of corruption, seems to have
also been stoked by recent protests and social movements
against corruption within Romania. It seems to be a fear of so-
cietal-level corruption that is also connected to one’s willing-
ness to accept or give bribes, but to a much lower degree than
expected. As we can see from Table 2.5., a full 50 per cent of
respondents who believe corruption is always justified also re-
port themselves to be extremely afraid of corruption. In this
case, the hypothesis of corruption as a structural issue in Roma-
nia is greatly emboldened by the fact that it is feared even by
the people most likely to find it justifiable – therefore it is con-
sidered more or less a trait of society rather than a behaviour
that one can or should try to escape from.
FIGURE 2.3: Additive scale of fear by percentage of population
Fear index – Additive scale
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
0
Not at all afraid Very afraid
13SOCIO-ECONOMIC CONTEXT
TABLE 2.5: Fear of corruption by justification of
accepting/giving a bribe
To what extent are you frightened of Corruption?
Not at all Somewhat A lot Total
Total 16,3 25,2 58,5 10 0
Justification of Accepting/giving a bribe
Never
justified
15,4 23,9 60,7 100
213,8 29,2 56,9 10 0
312 33,3 54,6 10 0
421,5 2 3,1 55,4 100
Always
justified
34 17 49 ,1 100
Pearson chi2(8) = 20.5661 Pr = 0.008
Our data show that fear of corruption is an issue especially for
respondents who have higher educational aspirations. About
two-thirds of people who want to pursue tertiary education re-
port themselves to be very afraid of corruption, compared to
only 40 per cent of those who are only interested in lower sec-
ondary or vocational education. Of course, this issue is also relat-
ed to economic efficacy. Respondents who want to pursue more
education are better embedded into society and therefore de-
pend more directly on its proper functioning, whereas respond-
ents who do not want to pursue education are likely to be less
adapted to society and subsequently less immediately afraid of
how corruption could affect them.
MIGRATION PLANS AND
PERSPECTIVES
Migration has been a contentious issue in Romania since the fall
of communism, but the importance of the issue has greatly in-
creased in recent years. According to a UN International Migra-
tion Report between 2007 and 2015, around 3.4 million Romani-
ans have emigrated, placing the country in second place globally
regarding the emigration growth rate between 2007 and 2015,
after Syria. Clearly, Romania’s migration problems have greatly
increased since the country was officially admitted to the Europe-
an Union and its citizens were allowed to freely move and obtain
employment across EU Member States (Sandu 2016; Sandu, Toth,
and Tudor 2018).
Confronted with poverty and lack of opportunities in the coun-
try, migration was a path opted for by many young people. In fact,
current research estimates that over 80 per cent of migrants who
have left Romania have indeed been of prime working age5. The
traditional migration literature has established that migration tends
to happen before the age of 40, with studies in North America
showing that migration intentions recede after this age (Constant
and Zimmermann 2013; Sherrod, Torney-Purta, and Flanagan
2010). Still, the reason cited is often inherent legal or bureaucrat-
ic difficulties in the transition, which is likely of a lesser concern
to EU Member States.
Migration is an extremely important topic to discuss in Roma-
nian society, for its scale and the greater context of the country
make migration extremely important for multiple areas of study.
Most often, migration is studied as a mechanism in which poten-
tial Romanian labour moves abroad, thus reducing the size and
capacity of Romania’s national economy. Secondly, migration is
studied as an anti-poverty instrument, both through its capacity
to provide economic opportunities to people who are otherwise
among the most marginalised groups in Romania, but also as a
function of remittances that Romanian workers abroad generally
send to the country.
As we can see from Figure 2.4., about 70 per cent of the
population of Romanian youths between 14 and 29 years of age
do not desire, at this point, to move to another country. Compared
to 2014, the figures seem to have changed remarkably, as fewer
young Romanians are considering a move. While in 2014 about
60 per cent of Romanian youths had some desire to leave the
country for more than 6 months, the figure in 2018 appears to be
at 30 per cent. This large disparity could be easily ascribed to the
fact that Romania was still under economic duress in 2014 and
has now registered several years of stronger economic growth,
but is also likely to be a survey effect.
FIGURE 2.4: Strength of desire to leave Romania by
population
None: 69,65 %
Weak: 10,70 %
Modera te: 9,88 %
Strong: 5,14 %
Very strong: 4,63 %
On closer inspection, our data allow us to also better understand
which groups are more likely to plan to migrate. One of the
strongest relationships illustrated is that between age and desire
to migrate. Respondents who are in the 14-to-19-year-old age
group have a much higher likelihood of reporting wanting to
leave the country, while this desire seems to decrease with age.
14 YOUTH STUDY ROMANIA 2018/2019
Clearly, the decline is due to at least two factors that are worth
noting: 1. As respondents age, they become more embedded in
Romanian society and are less likely to want to leave anymore,
regardless of their earlier plans; 2. With the passage of time, re-
spondents who have an intense desire to leave are more likely to
actually leave and not be included in our demographic groups
any longer.
The most interesting findings seem to be related to the afflu-
ence of the respondents who report wanting to leave. As we can
see, perhaps counter-intuitively, the data show that respondents
with better access to goods have a higher likelihood of reporting
a desire to leave. Similarly, parental education seems to also have
a similar effect, with a more marginal level of statistical significance.
The explanation for this dynamic is likely connected to the particu-
larity of the decision-making process which is under query here.
Respondents from more affluent families are more likely to desire
to leave as a personal choice which is related to development,
education, better employment opportunities or other things. Re-
spondents from less affluent families tend to leave less as a choice
that is thought-out and planned and more as a necessity which
arises from their inferior access to employment or opportunities.
Also, worse-off youth tend to have worse access to foreign lan-
guages and bureaucratic efficacy, which would encourage them
to report that they want to migrate for long periods of time. In-
stead, they are more likely to migrate for shorter periods of time,
in connection with particular work patterns or opportunities
abroad (Sandu 2016).
TABLE 2.6: Strength of desire to leave by age, region,
goods ownership and parental education
Strength of desire to leave Romania for more
than 6 months
Total 69,7 10,7 9,9 9,8 100
None Weak Mod-
erate
Strong Total
Age group
14 to 18 54,8 18 ,1 14 13,1 100
19 to 22 67,8 8,3 11, 3 12,6 100
23 to 26 72,8 9,8 8,7 8,7 100
27 to 29 80,9 7, 4 6,3 5,5 100
Pearson chi2(9) = 45.2400 Pr = 0.000
Region of the Country
Bucuresti 62,5 8,3 13,9 15,3 100
Moldova 67,6 8,8 11,1 12,5 10 0
Muntenia 68,6 11,5 10,4 9,5 100
Transilvania 73,7 11, 6 7,6 7100
Pearson chi2(9) = 12.7070 Pr = 0.176
10 Point Scale of Consumption Goods Ownership
0 – 4 Goods 84,6 6,2 3 ,1 6,2 100
4 – 6 Goods 69,4 8,5 11,9 10,2 10 0
7 – 8 Goods 66,2 14,6 9,2 9,9 100
9 – 10 Goods 47, 6 17, 5 15,9 19 100
Pearson chi2(9) = 45.3477 Pr = 0.000
Parental Education Level
Parents less
than
highschool
75,5 9,4 7,7 7,3 100
One parent
more than
highscool
69,3 10, 2 11 9,5 100
Parents
more than
highscool
60,7 16 ,2 10,3 12,8 100
Pearson chi2(6) = 11.4183 Pr = 0.076
Even more, we can see that Romanian youth are not alone in
their desire to migrate. In fact, they desire to migrate to a much
lesser extent than youth from non-EU countries. While Romanian
youth who have a strong desire to leave total about 10 per cent
of the cohort, this figure jumps to 44 per cent in Albania, 35 per
cent in Macedonia and Kosovo (Figure 2.5.). Indeed, most EU
Member States under study here seem to have an understated
desire to migrate, as they are currently in a good position to stay
in their own countries and benefit from the economic growth
that was expected from EU accession.
The above-mentioned dynamics are also confirmed by the
follow-up question for those who leave regarding the timeline
15SOCIO-ECONOMIC CONTEXT
when they are planning to be leaving the country. We can of
course expect migration to be more likely when it is planned to
happen at a sooner point in time. The more the time of departure
is delayed, the less likely it is that migration will actually take place.
Indeed, as we can see in Table 2.6., younger respondents rarely
plan to leave within the next 6 months up to two years, while
older respondents are generally dedicated to the idea of leaving
soon. Although females tend to report a desire to migrate that is
similar in intensity to males, the latter tend to have a greater like-
lihood of migrating. This may be due to inherent disparities in
migration-related problems that affect females much more, such
as issues of security or trustworthiness.
All in all, respondents with more access to goods and more
plans for education tend to desire to leave more, but respondents
with less access to goods tend to plan to leave sooner, as their
needs tend to be restrictive and immediate.
Albania
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Bulgaria
Croatia
Kosovo
Macedonia
Montenegro
Romania
Serbia
Slovenia
0 % 10 % 20 % 30 % 40 % 50 % 60 % 70 % 80 % 9 0 % 100 %
FIGURE 2.5: Strength of desire to migrate by Country
None Weak Moderate Strong
16 YOUTH STUDY ROMANIA 2018/2019
TABLE 2.7: When to migrate by gender, age, aspired educational level and goods ownership
Within how long time do you imagine leaving the country?
Total 13, 2 15,1 14 12,7 1,1 43,9 100
Within the
next 6
months
Within the
next two
years
Within the
next five
years
Within the
next 10 years
More than
10 years from
now
Don' t know Total
Sex of the respondent
Female 818,4 16,7 13, 2 043,7 100
Male 17, 8 12, 2 11,7 12,2 244,2 100
Pearson chi2(5) = 14.2276 Pr = 0.014
Age group
14 to 18 6,6 14 17,4 18 ,2 2,5 41,3 100
19 to 22 20,4 11 ,8 15,1 15 ,1 1,1 36,6 100
23 to 26 12,5 18, 8 12,5 9,4 046,9 10 0
27 to 29 16 ,4 16, 4 8,2 3,3 055,7 100
Pearson chi2(15) = 28.2395 Pr = 0.020
What is your aspired level of education?
Lower
Secondary/
Vocational
30,8 23,1 15,4 0 0 30,8 10 0
High School 24,4 20,9 10,5 5,8 1,2 37,2 10 0
Bachelor
University
1,2 8,2 15,3 18, 8 056,5 100
Post
Graduate
4,8 13,3 19 21,9 1,9 39 100
Pearson chi2(15) = 66.9243 Pr = 0.000
10 Point Scale of Consumption Goods Ownership
0 – 4 Goods 13, 6 13,6 4,5 4,5 2,3 61,4 100
4 – 6 Goods 11 ,5 18 ,3 20,6 14,5 035 ,1 100
7 – 8 Goods 11, 5 14,5 10,7 16,8 1,5 45 100
9 – 10 Goods 25 13,9 19,4 8,3 2,8 30,6 100
Pearson chi2(15) = 27.8004 Pr = 0.023
The salience of the class issue is also visible in the envisioned
length of the stay abroad. Regression analyses show that there is
a substantively large (and marginally statistically significant) dif-
ference in the envisioned length of stay between groups.
Thus, female respondents who have access to more goods in
Romania and those who have a higher aspired level of education
tend to want to stay for longer periods, while the other respond-
ents are more tempted to even leave for trips shorter than a year.
More so, we can see that the most common means of preparing
one’s departure abroad is to contact friends or relatives who live
abroad. While it would be difficult to fully grasp the mechanism
of migration intended, we can see that more than 70 per cent of
respondents who have actually contacted friends or relatives
abroad have educational aspirations that do not go beyond high-
school level. Half of them have also attempted to contact poten-
tial employees. Instead, potential migrants with higher education-
al aspirations tend to have not done many things to prepare for
their move to another country. More than 60 per cent of respond-
ents who say they have contacted potential school/universities
aspire to attain post-graduate education.
17SOCIO-ECONOMIC CONTEXT
TABLE 2.8: Length of stay and preparation for
departure by population
For how long would
you plan to stay
abroad?
What have you done
to prepare your move to
another country?
Less than a year 13, 48 Contacted
friends/relatives
who live abroad
17, %
One to five
years
23,72 Received funding
scholarship
0, %
Five to
ten years
11, 59 Contacted
potential schools/
universities
4, %
Ten to
twenty years
9,7 Contacted
potential
employers
6, %
Don’t know 41,51 Contacted the
embassy
1, %
Total 100
Finally, we can see that migrants show an overwhelming inten-
tion to migrate to EU Member States. Of the 71 per cent of re-
spondents who have expressed a preference for a particular
country to which they would like to relocate, 60 per cent chose
an EU country. Germany is the favourite country of young Roma-
nians who have a desire to migrate, while Great Britain comes in
at a close second.
TABLE 2.9: Preferred country of destination for
migration by population
What country would you prefer to move to?
Austria 2,96
Denmark 2,43
Finland 1,08
France 8,09
Germany 18 ,87
Great Britain 14,29
Italy 7, 82
Netherlands 1,89
Norway 2,16
Sweden 1,62
Switzerland 2,16
USA 7,82
Other 8,89
I don’t know 15,63
No answer 4,31
MAIN RESULTS
— How rich or poor young people feel is generally not only
determined by how much money they have or how many
goods their household has at its disposal. Poverty is a more
general sentiment that transcends one’s material situation
and is also related to the young person’s relative position in
society. Those who tend to feel discriminated against also
tend to feel poorer. Similarly, those who live in environ-
ments with considerable inequality also tend to feel poorer.
— Parental education has a major effect on the outlook of
young people. Respondents who come from families where
parents are more highly educated tend to be more ambi-
tious with their educational aspirations and feel less poor,
even when they do not necessarily have access to a lot of
goods in the household. Growing up in a household with
more highly educated parents seems to have a very strong
effect on a child’s development, as academic research has
shown before with regard to other countries. Romania suf-
fers from the relatively reduced number of highly educated
households, though.
— Young Romanians tend to be extremely confident about their
own futures, but less confident about the future of their coun-
trymen and the country itself. This difference in outlook is due
mainly to the ease of migration, which seems to be consid-
ered to be a good fall-back option for the future by most re-
spondents if their life in Romania does not yield the results
they are expecting. The belief that migration to a Western
country would sort out governance or civic problems may ac-
celerate the unwillingness of young Romanians to participate
in civic and political life. Many young Romanians are not em-
boldened to participate in the politics or civic life of the coun-
try because of this lack of attachment to the community.
— There seems to be a high incidence of fear within the 14-to-
29-year-old population of the country. Young Romanians
seem to be more fearful of almost everything than people
in the region. The greatest such fear is that of corruption,
closely followed by the fear of poverty and social injustice.
The strongest fear identified, that of corruption, seems to
have also been stoked by recent protests and social move-
ments against corruption within Romania.
— About 30 per cent of 14-to-29-year-olds in Romania have
some desire to migrate away from Romania for at least 6
months. The score is relatively low for the region and has
dropped steeply compared to 2014 figures, when almost 60
per cent of young Romanians were thinking of migration.
Migration intentions seem to decrease with age and, while
males and females report the same desire to migrate, fe-
males are significantly less likely to have made plans or have
contacted someone. On the other hand, most young Roma-
nian females who do want to migrate do so to add to their
education, while males seem to be more interested in work
opportunities.
18 YOUTH STUDY ROMANIA 2018/2019
— Most of the desire to leave and plans to do so are connect-
ed to feelings of poverty and lack of access to consumer
goods. The most likely explanation is that many young Roma-
nians decide they need to leave the country to access a better
life. Younger migrants are almost exclusively from the poor-
est strata of society, while older migrants tend to be split up
evenly between job and education-seekers. The overwhelm-
ing majority of would-be migrants want to stay within the EU,
especially in Germany and Great Britain.
21
Sociological research on youth is increasingly preoccupied with
issues of social trust or proximity to certain groups and social
distance or rejection of certain groups. The underlying hypothe-
sis in this thinking is that the social values and habits that young
people develop with in their formative years will be the values
that they will espouse in the future as well. Multiple factors can
influence these values and beliefs through a process that is better
known as socialisation or the development of an understanding
about the world (Neundorf and Smets, 2017). Some of these fac-
tors are related to the family, while others are more connected to
friends, media, education or others. Young people learn from
multiple sources to develop these values and ideas.
In this chapter, we will explore some of these issues, the chang-
ing role of the family, expectations about demography and social
roles which will influence the future of Romanian society. This
chapter will also have to take into account the important chrono-
logical particularities of this cohort. Due to EU accession, the
windfall of Internet access and many other factors, including the
fact that almost all of our respondents were born after Romania’s
anti-communist revolution, there is an expectation that we are
witnessing a different demographic cohort. In recent years, young
people in Romania have been more connected to their peers in
Western countries than ever before in the history of the country.
Their potential to borrow beliefs and values, ideas about marriage,
discrimination or other issues of modernity is an important ques-
tion for the future that has generally been left unanswered for
Romania.
THE FAMILIES OF YOUNG PEOPLE –
TODAY AND TOMORROW
Non-marital relationships seem to be highly prevalent in extreme-
ly small municipalities (under 5,000 people) and in extremely
large municipalities (over 500,000 people – in this case, Bucha-
rest). While the trend is similar, the reasons behind this may very
well be different. Normally, life in smaller communities is general-
ly associated with a high domestic workload (mainly agricultural),
which pushes young people to seek out a partner early in order
to increase the efficacy of one’s household. Also, young people
in rural areas tend to become independent sooner. On the other
end of the spectrum, life in major cities such as Bucharest gener-
ally delays the point in time when young people consider mar-
riage. While 19 per cent of people in our sample report that they
are married, only 10 per cent of young people in Bucharest report
the same. Young people delay the moment they get married in
order to finish their education, find a well-paid job, improve their
economic standing, etc.
The influence of age in one’s relationship status is relatively
intuitive and extremely elastic. As we can easily see from the table,
young people between 14 and 18 years of age are generally not
married, and at the most are in a relationship (generally not living
together). As they advance in age, the prevalence of being in a
relationship increases and some young people also get married.
After the age of 23, more and more respondents are married or
in live-in relationships. The generational cycle finishes with people
between 27 and 29 years of age, half of whom are married and
another quarter of whom are in relationships (for the first time
more live-in relationships) and 1 per cent of the sample also report
that they are divorced.
3
FAMILY, SOCIETY
AND SOCIAL TRUST
22 YOUTH STUDY ROMANIA 2018/2019
TABLE 3.1: Relationship status by parental education level, goods ownership, sex, age
and size of municipality
What is your current relationship status?
Single Married Live-in
partner
Relation-
ship, not
living
together
Divorced To tal
Total 56 19 915 0100
Population of Municipality
Under 5000 inhabitants 55 20 11 15 0100
5 – 10.000 inhabitant s 58 24 512 0100
10 – 100.000 inhabitant s 56 23 912 0100
100.000 – 500.000
inhabitants
56 14 919 1100
More than 500.000
inhabitants
56 10 14 20 0100
Pearson chi2(16) = 32.4587 Pr = 0.009
Age group
14 to 18 86 0 3 11 0100
19 to 22 67 5 5 22 0 100
23 to 26 51 18 12 19 0100
27 to 29 25 50 16 8 1 100
Pearson chi2(12) = 353.1705 Pr = 0.000
Sex of the respondent
Female 50 25 816 0100
Male 63 13 10 14 0100
Pearson chi2(4) = 28.3425 Pr = 0.000
Scale of Material Goods Ownership
0 – 4 Goods 40 38 11 11 0100 List of material goods
4 – 6 Goods 61 15 816 0100 House/apartment
7 – 8 Goods 61 10 920 0100 Mobile telephone
9 – 10 Goods 57 21 813 2100 Personal computer
Pearson chi2(12) = 85.2364 Pr = 0.000 Internet at home
Bicycle
Parental Education Level Motorcycle
Parents less than
highschool
49 27 11 12 0100 Air conditioning
One parent more than
highscool
58 17 916 0100 Dish washing machine
Parents more than
highscool
60 11 820 1100 Washing machine
Pearson chi2(8) = 25.3218 Pr = 0.001 Car
The relationship between material welfare and relationship status
also tells us something about the meaning of family life in a coun-
try such as Romania. Close to 22 per cent of 14-29-year-olds in
Romania have access to less than 5 of the material goods consid-
ered important for a comfortable life, which we will call severely
materially deprived similar to the Eurostat indicator. This group of
people also tends to be married at a much greater rate than any
of the other groups under study. This finding is not entirely sur-
prising since recent work on marginalised and poor communities
in other countries has shown that poor tend to also increasingly
23FAMILY, SOCIETY AND SOCIAL TRUST
perceive early marriage as a way to overcome poverty, though
with a much lower level of success (Goffman 2014)”
These dynamics are also belied by the final covariate in Table
3.1., which shows that respondents both of whose parents have
not finished high school tend to be more likely to get married
before the age of 29, accounting for 27 per cent of the sample.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, respondents both of whose
parents have university degrees tend not to marry before the age
of 29, with only 11 per cent of them being married.
When the respondents are asked how they see themselves in
the future, the differences between subgroups are much less prev-
alent. Across all the groups analysed, about 90 per cent of re
-
spondents see themselves married with children in the future6.
Also, we see that respondents who perceive themselves and their
household as poor (“Barely enough money to survive”) are some-
what less determined to marry in the future (85 per cent compared
with the average of 91 per cent). Instead, they see themselves
more likely to live together out of wedlock and have children.
THE PLAN TO HAVE CHILDREN
Table 3.2. illustrates how many children the respondents have,
divided up by the subgroups already discussed. This table further
shows the path-dependency of marriage, with 75 per cent of
married couples already having at least one child, but also indi-
cates the increase in number of births out of wedlock – 12 per
cent of people are in a domestic partnership. The data also points
to a greater likelihood of having children for respondents who
live in municipalities with fewer than 10,000 inhabitants, with
about 25 per cent of youth in these places already having at least
one child. At the opposite end of the spectrum, only 5 per cent
of people between the ages of 14 and 29 living in Bucharest have
had a child7.
24 YOUTH STUDY ROMANIA 2018/2019
TABLE 3.2: Current number of children according to parental education, goods ownership,
sex, age, size of municipality and civil status
Current number of chilldren
None 1 2 3 or more Total
Total 82 11 6 1 100
Current status
Single 99 1 0 0 10 0
Married 24 49 24 4100
In a partnership 88 7 4 1 10 0
Pearson chi2(6) = 548.8061 Pr = 0.000
Population of Municipality
Under 5000 inhabitants 77 13 8 2 100
5 – 10.000 inhabitant s 74 18 7 2 100
10 – 100.000 inhabitant s 83 11 5 1 100
100.000 – 500.000 inhabitants 88 8 4 0 10 0
More than 500.000 inhabitants 95 3 3 0 100
Pearson chi2(12) = 30.0528 Pr = 0.003
Age group
14 to 18 98 2 0 0 100
19 to 22 94 3 2 0 10 0
23 to 26 84 11 4 0 100
27 to 29 54 28 15 3100
Pearson chi2(9) = 204.4962 Pr = 0.000
Sex of the respondent
Female 76 14 9 2 100
Male 88 9 2 0 100
Pearson chi2(3) = 29.6831 Pr = 0.000
Scale of Material Goods Ownership
0 – 4 Goods 64 21 13 2100
4 – 6 Goods 85 10 5 1 100
7 – 8 Goods 92 5 2 0 100
9 – 10 Goods 84 11 5 0 100
Pearson chi2(9) = 73.8167 Pr = 0.000
Parental Education Level
Parents less than highschool 71 17 10 2100
One parent more than highscool 87 9 3 1 10 0
Parents more than highscool 90 4 5 2 100
Pearson chi2(6) = 43.3910 Pr = 0.000
Finally, the material deprivation scale and the parental education
scale both confirm that people who are materially less well-off
and whose parents have not finished high school are more likely
to have children by the age of 29. This is not a novel finding, Ro-
mania being one of the countries with the highest level of child
poverty not only in Europe, but in the world (Tesliuc, Grigoras,
and Stanculescu 2015; Tesliuc et al. 2014; Gábos et al. 2015;
World Bank 2018; World Vision 2018).
The planned number of children also helps to shed some light
on the situation. About one-quarter of respondents say that they
do not know how many children they plan to have. Of those who
do offer a figure, the general mean is 1.8 children, which is signif-
25FAMILY, SOCIETY AND SOCIAL TRUST
icantly below the number of births per woman required to keep
the population constant (2.2 births per woman), but also signifi-
cantly higher than Romania’s current number of births per wom.
What is surprising in this context is the extent of the difference
between the current number of children and desired number of
children of respondents according to material welfare. As we
can see in Figure 3.1., respondents who have access to 0 – 4
goods tend to have more than twice as many children as
respondents with access to more goods. At the same time, we
can see that respondents with access to 0 – 4 goods tend to
plan to have fewer children than people with access to more
goods. More simply put, although poorer respondents plan to
have fewer children, they also tend at present to have more
children than non-poor respondents. This situation could be ex-
plained by the fact that respondents who tend to have children
extremely early also start a new household earlier in life and are
inevitably poor when they do so.
A more structural explanation for this situation could be that
poorer respondents tend to have more children sooner compared
to richer respondents because they are socialised to get married
earlier, have less knowledge of and access to sexual education and
adhere more closely to traditional gender roles.
Table 3.3 shows the situation of the actual and planned num-
ber of children by country. We can see that young people from
Romania tend to have slightly more children at present than young
people from other countries in the region. In fact, Romania and
Bulgaria seem to be head-to-head to this contest, while countries
with a much higher fertility rate, but also worse economic pros-
pects, have young people with fewer children within the 14-to-
29-year-old bracket.
The situation changes dramatically with regard to the planned
number of children, where we see that more economically devel-
oped countries also tend to plan far fewer children. In fact, Roma-
nian youth are on par with Slovenia and close to Croatia with regard
to persons not planning to have any children at all in the future.
FIGURE 3.1: Planned and current number of children
by goods ownership
2,0
1,9
1,8
1,7
1,6
1,5
0– 4 Go ods
Planned Number of Children
5 – 6 Goods 7 – 8 G oods 9 – 10 Goo ds
6
5
4
3
2
1
Numbers of Current Children
26 YOUTH STUDY ROMANIA 2018/2019
TABLE 3.3: Current and planned number of children by country
Albania Bosnia
and
Herze-
govina
Bulgaria Croatia Kosovo Monte-
negro
Romania Serbia Slovenia Tot al
Current number of children
None 91,2 8 7,7 81 86,7 90,6 8 9,7 82 93,3 91,1 87, 2
14,9 8,2 14,3 8,2 4,3 711, 5 3,9 5,2 5,2
23,6 3,4 3,7 3,8 42,9 5,5 2,4 2,8 4,1
3 or
more
0,3 0,7 1,1 1, 2 1,2 0,5 10,4 0,9 1
Total 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 10 0
Planned number of children
None 2,8 0,9 0,5 8,4 0,7 5,8 10,8 3,8 10,4 4,6
16,1 8,4 14,5 10 2,4 3,7 17 4,4 9,4 8,4
261,9 61,4 71,4 56,9 4 4,9 38,2 58,4 51,9 53,3 56,3
3 or
more
29,2 29,3 13,7 24,6 52 52,2 13,8 39,9 27 30,7
Total 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 10 0
ASPIRATIONS TO MARRY –
WHEN AND WHY
There is a clear tendency for respondents who live in smaller
municipalities, households with a lower goods ownership and a
lower parental education level to believe that women should
marry younger. Apart from this stratification, we can also see a
consistent difference in the estimation of the ideal age of mar-
riage for women between men and women, which is compati-
ble with an international trend in family life (Becker and Becker
2009). There is an extremely consistent difference between
genders in the estimation of this ideal age of marriage for wom-
en, with men generally believing women should get married
one year younger. Segmentation points in the direction of inter-
sectionality, with women respondents from larger cities or rich-
er households seeing a minor increase in this difference, which
belies the fact that women in such circumstances perceive
themselves as having more opportunities for development
which they need to take advantage of before getting married.
As we can see from Figure 3.2., respondents from households
that are poorer in terms of material goods tend to believe that
women should marry earlier, regardless of their own gender. As
the material prosperity of households increase and the occupa-
tional or educational opportunities of women improve, we can
identify a significant difference between genders in opinions
regarding the ideal age for marriage, with women tending to
see this ideal age later than men.
FIGURE 3.2: Ideal age of marriage for women by
goods ownership
27
26
25
24
23
Female Male
Ideal Age of Marriage for Women
0 – 4 Goods
5 – 6 Goods
7 – 8 Goods
9 – 10 Goods
Another relevant point to stress is the increased difference in
the ideal age of marriage between genders. Although female
respondents believe the ideal age of marriage is higher for both
genders, they still believe that a man should marry about 2.5
years later than women. This difference is consistent with the
difference identified in the 2014 FES youth study, where an al-
most identical difference between ideal ages for marriage was
identified (see Table 3.4.). The main differences between 2014
and 2018 seem to be driven by a change of heart in female re-
spondents, who have now pushed back the ideal age of mar-
riage for females by almost a year and for males by 0.3 years.
27FAMILY, SOCIETY AND SOCIAL TRUST
This change underlines the increase in occupational and educa-
tional opportunities that have become available and important
to be exploited before marriage, especially in the opinions of
women.
TABLE 3.4: Ideal age of marriage for women and men by size of municipality, goods ownership and
parental education
Ideal Age of Marriage for Women Ideal Age of Marriage for Men
Female Male Tot al Female Male Total
Total 25,5 24,5 25 Total 27, 9 27 27, 5
Population of Municipality Population of Municipality
Under 5000 inhabitants 25,1 24,4 24,8 Under 5000 inhabitants 2 7,8 26,7 27,2
5 – 10.000 inhabitant s 24,9 23,8 24,3 5 – 10.000 inhabitants 27 26,6 26,8
10 – 100.000 inhabitant s 24,8 24,5 24,7 10 – 100.000 inhabi tants 27,4 27 2 7,2
100.000 – 500.000 inhabitants 26,3 24,9 25,7 100.000 – 500.000
inhabitants
28,6 27,4 2 8,1
More than 500.000 inhabitants 26,3 25,4 25,8 More than 500.000
inhabitants
28 ,1 28,1 2 8,1
10 Point Scale of Consumption Goods Ownership 10 Point Scale of Consumption Goods Ownership
0 – 4 Goods 24 ,1 24 24 ,1 0 – 4 Goods 26,9 26,6 26,7
4 – 6 Goods 25,7 24,7 25,2 4 – 6 Goo ds 28,3 27, 2 27, 8
7 – 8 Goods 25,8 25,2 25,5 7 – 8 Go ods 28 27,6 27,8
9 – 10 Goods 25,9 24 25 9 – 10 Goods 27 25,9 26,5
Parental Education Level Parental Education Level
Parents less than highschool 24,5 23,9 24,2 Parents less than highschool 27,1 26,2 26,7
One parent more than highscool 25,9 24,8 25,3 One parent more than
highscool
28,4 27,4 2 7,9
Parents more than highscool 2 6,1 25,6 25,9 Parents more than highscool 27, 8 27,6 2 7,7
DESIRED TRAITS IN A PARTNER
As we can see from Figure 3.3., the factors desired in one’s
choice of a life partner have not changed radically from the 2014
study. Young people nowadays are driven by relatively similar val-
ues and desires, underpinning a certain social stability that has
endured. The main differences seem to be recorded with regard
to physical appearance, with youth in 2018 less interested in this
factor than youth in 2014, and religious beliefs, with youth now-
adays being significantly more interested in religious compatibili-
ty with their partner.
The Table 3.5. shows that there is a consistent difference be-
tween genders in the importance of traits when choosing a part-
ner. The only trait that is more important for men than it is for
women seems to be the trait related to physical appearance, where
71 per cent of men say this is important, as compared to only
61 per cent of women. Conversely, women seem to care signifi-
cantly more about almost everything else, especially education,
economic situation and religious beliefs.
TABLE 3.5: Importance of factors in the choice of
partner by gender
How important are the following factors to your
choice of a marriage partner
Females Males Tot al
Common Interests 86 82 84
Personality 86 81 83
Education 72 63 67
Physical Appearance 61 71 66
Family Approval 55 50 52
Economic Situation 53 45 49
Religious beliefs 49 42 46
Nationality 41 36 38
Virginity 21 21 21
28 YOUTH STUDY ROMANIA 2018/2019
SEXUAL BEHAVIOUR AS A
GENDERED ISSUE
Responses to questions of a sexual nature remain differentiated
by gender, but show a significant levelling off compared to the
data recorded in the 2014 questionnaire. Males tend to report
having been exposed to multiple partners overall (and at an ear-
lier age) than females. Clearly, questions about sexual behaviour
are likely to be exposed to certain confounding factors: a desira-
bility bias, making certain respondents more likely to over-report
the number of sexual partners and other respondents to un-
der-report this number or refuse to answer. In comparison to
2014, we see that both genders have greatly increased the rate of
non-response, in general as a factor of age and current relation-
ship status. As such, older respondent and respondents who are
married or in a committed relationship tend to report that they
are uncomfortable answering this question. Another potential
confounding factor seems to be related to the region the re-
spondent lives in, with respondents from Transylvania, a region
that is relatively conservative in religious terms, tending to de-
cline to answer at a greater rate than respondents from other
regions. Also, respondents from more educated families tend to
refuse to answer the question more often, while respondents
who own more consumer goods tend to be more forthcoming,
which is mainly a factor of age and relationship status. Finally,
personal church attendance seems to influence sexual behaviour
in terms of limiting the number of partners, but not necessarily in
terms of how comfortable the respondents are in interacting
with the topic.
Common interests
Personality
Education
Physical Appearance
Family Approval
Economic Situation
Religious Beliefs
Nationality
Virginity
0 % 10 % 20 % 30 % 40 % 50 % 60 % 70 % 80 % 9 0 % 100 %
FIGU RE 3.3: Important traits in choosing a marriage partner, comparison between 2014 and 2018
How important are the following factors to your choice of a marriage partner?
2014
2018
81
84
85
83
65
67
79
66
56
52
47
49
35
46
34
38
25
21
29FAMILY, SOCIETY AND SOCIAL TRUST
TABLE 3.6: Number of partners by gender, age, region, parental education, goods ownership and church attendance
No sex One
partner
Multiple
partners
Not comfortable
to answer
Tot al
Total 15, 60 % 21,0 % 28 ,9 % 34,5 % 100 ,0 %
Sex of the respondent
Female 2018 18, 8 % 27, 8 % 18,3 % 35,2 % 100, 0 %
Fe ma le 2014 28,0 % 36,0 % 2 7, 0 % 9,0 % 100 ,0 %
Male 2018 12 ,3 % 14 ,2 % 39,7 % 33,9 % 10 0,0 %
Ma le 2014 18 ,0 % 19, 0 % 56,0 % 7, 0 % 10 0, 0 %
Pearson chi2(3) = 71.9049 Pr = 0.000
Age group
14 to 18 51, 2 % 14 ,9 % 8,3 % 25,6 % 10 0,0 %
19 to 22 10,0 % 24,5 % 29,3 % 36,1 % 10 0,0 %
23 to 26 4,2 % 20 ,1 % 41,5 % 34,3 % 10 0,0 %
27 to 29 0 ,7 % 24,3 % 33,6 % 41,4 % 100 ,0 %
Pearson chi2(9) = 335.2448 Pr = 0.000
Region of the Country
Bucuresti 1 7,1 % 23,2 % 28,0 % 31,7 % 10 0,0 %
Moldova 15, 0 % 24 ,3 % 29, 6 % 31,0 % 100, 0 %
Muntenia 16, 4 % 2 3,1 % 31, 8 % 28,6 % 10 0,0 %
Transilvania 14,6 % 16 ,3 % 25,6 % 43,5 % 100, 0 %
Pearson chi2(9) = 22.4505 Pr = 0.008
Parental Education Level
Parents less than highschool 11 ,0 % 24, 6 % 2 7,2 % 37, 2 % 10 0, 0 %
One parent more than highscool 18, 3 % 20,9 % 31,1 % 29,7 % 10 0,0 %
Parents more than highscool 13, 8 % 15, 2 % 24,6 % 46,4 % 10 0,0 %
Pearson chi2(6) = 23.3199 Pr = 0.001
10 Point Scale of Consumption Goods Ownership
0 – 4 Goods 7,7 % 25,8 % 24 ,9 % 41,6 % 100 ,0 %
4 – 6 Goods 15, 4 % 20,7 % 28,5 % 35,4 % 100, 0 %
7 – 8 Goods 21,2 % 19, 2 % 34,8 % 24,8 % 100 ,0 %
9 – 10 Goods 18, 2 % 21,2 % 24,2 % 36,4 % 100 ,0 %
Pearson chi2(9) = 35.9697 Pr = 0.000
Church attendance apart from weddings and funerals
Never or less than once a year 16 ,3 % 13, 3 % 42,9 % 27, 6 % 10 0,0 %
Only for Christmas or Easter 14,1 % 22,0 % 29,9 % 33,9 % 10 0, 0 %
About monthly 10,2 % 25,9 % 2 3,5 % 40,4 % 10 0,0 %
Once a week or more 26,4 % 23,3 % 15 ,5 % 34,9 % 100 ,0 %
Pearson chi2(9) = 48.4106 Pr = 0.000
As Table 3.6 shows, the issue of abstinence also used to be
largely gender-dependent, as exhibited by 2014 research, but
no longer registers significant differences in responses between
males and females.
Similar to the 2014 research, we see that young respondents
tend to be more preoccupied with abstinence than older respond-
ents. Most likely this is a result of the parental education respond-
ents receive, which is overwhelmingly geared toward sexual
abstinence at a young age. Once respondents reach adulthood,
we see a change of heart regarding abstinence that endures in
time, with about 50 per cent of respondents generally considering
abstinence an unnecessary burden or an outdated concept.
30 YOUTH STUDY ROMANIA 2018/2019
One of the most relevant indicators regarding sexual behaviour
for the overall public health situation of a society is the use of
contraceptive methods, which we can see in Table 10. As we can
see, there is a small difference between the genders in terms of
awareness and information regarding contraceptive methods,
but also in terms of sexual activity. What is most worrying about
this difference is that it is not due to age alone, as males persis-
tently report across all age groups that they are not informed
about contraceptive methods, whereas women who are not in-
formed seem to cluster at the under-18-year-old age group. What
is more, the respondents who report never using contraceptive
or birth control methods seem to only increase with age in a rel-
atively even manner between genders.
TABLE 3.7: Sexual abstinence by gender, age, size of municipality and church attendance
What do you think about sexual abstinence before marriage?
Virtue for
both genders
Virtue for
girls
Unnecessary
psychologi-
cal burden
Outdated
concept
Refuse to
Answer
Total
Total 13, 5 % 9,6 % 9,5 % 36,8 % 3 0,4 % 10 0,0 %
Sex of the respondent
Female 2018 11, 8 % 10,6 % 9,7 % 37, 6 % 3 0,2 % 10 0,0 %
Female 2014 26,0 % 18,0 % 8,0 % 37, 0 % 11, 0 % 100 ,0 %
Male 2018 15 ,3 % 8,6 % 9,4 % 36,0 % 30 ,7 % 10 0,0 %
Male 2014 17, 0 % 13, 0 % 11 ,0 % 45,0 % 12, 0 % 10 0, 0 %
Pearson chi2(4) = 3.7667 Pr = 0.438
Age group
14 to 18 17, 4 % 13, 6 % 6 ,6 % 25,2 % 37, 2 % 100, 0 %
19 to 22 15 ,3 % 8,4 % 10 ,0 % 36,5 % 29,7 % 10 0,0 %
23 to 26 11,1 % 8,0 % 12 ,1 % 43,3 % 25,6 % 100, 0 %
27 to 29 11, 2 % 9,0 % 9,0 % 4 0,7 % 30,2 % 10 0, 0 %
Pearson chi2(12) = 34.3145 Pr = 0.001
Population of Municipality
Under 5000 inhabitants 16,5 % 14 ,4 % 8,8 % 31,6 % 28,8 % 10 0,0 %
5 – 10.000 inhabitant s 14, 4 % 7, 5 % 5 ,9 % 33,2 % 3 9,0 % 100 ,0 %
10 – 100.000 inhabitant s 11 ,3 % 10 ,8 % 11, 7 % 28 ,4 % 3 7, 8 % 10 0,0 %
100.000 – 500.000 inhabitants 14, 0 % 5,5 % 11, 8 % 47, 8 % 2 1,0 % 10 0,0 %
More than 500.000
inhabitants
6 ,1 % 8,5 % 7, 3 % 50,0 % 28,0 % 10 0,0 %
Pearson chi2(16) = 61.5457 Pr = 0.000
Church attendance apart from weddings and funerals
Never or less than once a year 11,7 % 10,7 % 12 ,2 % 41, 3 % 24 ,0 % 10 0,0 %
Only for Christmas or Easter 13, 6 % 9, 8 % 10,4 % 39,9 % 26,4 % 10 0,0 %
About monthly 9,0 % 10 ,2 % 6,6 % 36,7 % 3 7,3 % 10 0,0 %
Once a week or more 20,2 % 7,0 % 6,2 % 22,5 % 44,2 % 10 0, 0 %
Pearson chi2(12) = 39.0618 Pr = 0.000
The refusal to use contraception is once again relatively independ-
ent of religiosity and church participation, similar to perceptions
regarding abstinence before marriage. Respondents who attend
church services less that once a year report a statistical propensi-
ty to not use contraception that is on par with respondents who
attend church once a week or more. Again, this shows a propen-
sity for a type of traditionalism that is relatively independent of
religious behaviour.
Our findings show that although respondents who are in a
relationship or marriage use contraception more rarely, at least 15
per cent of single respondents are in the same situation. Most of
them are respondents who have an active sex life, with multiple
31FAMILY, SOCIETY AND SOCIAL TRUST
partners. This situation further underpins a need for the state to
step in and offer more sexual education to young people so that
they may better control their sexual and family life, even if they
are born in smaller, rural municipalities and/or in families where
parents have less education.
A comparison between countries in use of contraceptive meas-
ures shows us that Romania and Slovenia have the biggest prob-
lems with the use of contraception. About 20 per cent of the
population of the two countries admit to either not being acquaint-
ed with contraceptive measures or not using them.
SOCIAL DISTANCE TO FAMILY
AND SOCIETY
Social trust is traditionally considered to be a precondition for any
sort of social cooperation (Hirschman 1982), community-building
(Putnam 2001) and even capitalism (Polanyi and MacIver
1944)”plainCitation”:”(Polanyi and MacIver 1944. In fact, the con-
cept of trust as an essential prerequisite for society was noted by
Adam Smith. In order to build bonds that can lead to a well-func-
tioning society, individuals need to be open to cooperate with
people they are not necessarily intimately familiar with (Gambet-
ta 2000, 1988). Trust in strangers may therefore be an important
factor in determining the future development of a society. Still,
former communist countries have been traditionally plagued
with extremely low levels of trust in both the state as well as in
other individuals (Ockenfels and Weimann 1999; Mishler and
Rose 1997; Badescu and Uslaner 2004). The reasons for this lack
of trust are relatively straightforward and connected to the re-
pressive nature of the state in communist times and the extreme-
ly broad network of informants in these countries.
This study offers us the opportunity to query respondents who
have – at the very most – experienced only the first year of their
lives under communism. Their perspectives on trust are thus free
from direct exposure to the repressiveness of the regime, but they
still show extremely low levels of social trust in unfamiliar persons
and institutions. Our question here evaluates social trust on a scale
from 1 to 5 (1 being not at all and 5 being very much). In the
following section, the analysis mainly uses the mean score of trust
by group. While we also add the comparison with 2014 figures,
we need to note that it is not necessarily forthcoming8.
As Table 3.8. shows, though, our respondents conserve a very
limited level of social trust in individuals who are outside of the
family, be it primary or extended.
TABLE 3.8: Social trust by year of research
Trust in Mean trust
(1 to 5)
2018
Mean trust
(1 to 5)
2014
Primary family 4,75 4,69
Extended family 3,92 3,93
Personal friends 3,62 3,62
Neighbours 2,80 2,73
Colleagues 3,12 3,05
Political leaders 1,61 ***
People of other religions 2,54 2,81
People of other political
beliefs
2,24 2,73
People of other
nationalities
2,71 2,65
Personal friends, with regard to whom respondents have the ab-
solute liberty to choose by themselves, are less trusted than indi-
viduals within the respondent’s extended family, who they often-
times spend much less time with. This situation shows how even
Albania
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Bulgaria
Croatia
Kosovo
Macedonia
Montenegro
Romania
Serbia
Slovenia
0 % 10 % 20 % 30 % 40 % 50 % 60 % 70 % 80 % 9 0 % 100 %
FIGURE 3.4: Contraceptive and birth control use by country
Do you use contraceptive or birth control measures?
Don’t know contraceptive methods
Yes, sometimes
Refuse to a nswer
No, never
Yes, as a rule
Haven’t had s ex
32 YOUTH STUDY ROMANIA 2018/2019
when Romanian youth are free to choose who to congregate
with, their trust tends to be limited by family ties. This type of
phenomenon clearly inhibits the potential of individuals to fully
cooperate with people outside of the family and thus greatly re-
duces the potential for communitarianism.
Trust in colleagues (in education or work) seems to be mod-
erate and relatively close to the level of trust in friends, which
further underpins the weak level of social trust for individuals who
are chosen by the respondents as opposed to those he associates
with for other reasons. Trust in neighbours seems to also be rela-
tively limited.
FIGURE 3.5: Social trust for out-groups by population
Social trust in “the other”
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
Not at all Neither nor Very much
Other political beliefs
Political leaders
Other religions
Other nationalities
In addition, social trust does not seem to vary significantly with
any of the usual confounders that we have analysed in this chap-
ter. Gender, municipality size, subjective income, ownership of
goods: none of these seem to affect social trust in any significant
way. Instead, the only minor variations identifiable are related to
the age of the respondent and the education of the parents.
Therefore, respondents coming from families with less-educated
parents seem to be consistently (though only marginally signifi-
cant) less trusting than other categories. This difference is likely
to be explained by educational and social opportunities. Young
people with more educated parents tend to also be more socially
active, have more friends, travel more and therefore develop in-
teractions with people outside of their family, hence reducing the
social distance toward otherness.
In addition to this, there seems to be a small positive effect of
living in Transylvania on overall social trust on a statistically signif-
icant scale. Most likely the effect is due to the fact that Transylva-
nia is a region with a significantly higher level of ethnic and reli-
gious diversity.
We can see how Romania is a relative outlier in the region, at
least with regard to trusting the extended family more than friends
are trusted. Indeed, only Romania, Albania, Kosovo and to a small-
er extent Macedonia seem to align with this structure. Whereas
in Albania and Kosovo higher level of trust in the family may be
a historical vestige and a result of recent wars, Romania has no
similar explanation.
Political leaders seem to be distrusted almost unilaterally by
youth in countries in the region, but figures regarding social trust
in people of other religions are surprising. Again, Kosovo, Serbia,
Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and to some extent even Mace-
donia are countries that have recently been through armed conflict
that was considered to be connected to religious differences.
Nonetheless, regardless of this recent history, young people in
these countries seem more trusting of people of other religions
than youth in Romania or Bulgaria.
33FAMILY, SOCIETY AND SOCIAL TRUST
TABLE 3.9: Social trust by country, mean scores
Social trust, Scale from 1 to 5
Family Extend-
ed
family
Friends Neigh-
bors
Col-
leagues
Politi-
cal
leaders
People
of other
reli-
gions
People
of other
politi-
cal
beliefs
People
of
other
nation-
alities
Social
trust
aver-
age
Albania 4,9 3,8 3,6 2,2 2,9 1,5 2,9 2,2 2,6 2,96
Bosnia
and
Herze-
govina
4,7 3,9 4 ,1 3,6 3,6 1,9 3,3 33,3 3,49
Bulgaria 4,8 4,1 4,2 3,1 3,5 1,7 2,6 2,8 33,31
Croatia 4,6 3,9 4,2 3,2 3,6 1,9 3,3 3,1 3,3 3,46
Kosovo 4,9 3,9 3,7 2,9 3,2 1,5 3 ,1 2,5 2,8 3,17
Mace-
donia
4,8 3,8 3,7 2,6 3,1 1,9 3,1 2,6 3,2 3,2
Monte-
negro
4,9 3,5 42,6 3,2 1,7 3,4 2,9 3,3 3,28
Roma-
nia
4,7 3,9 3,6 2,8 3 ,1 1,6 2,5 2,2 2,7 3,01
Serbia 4,8 3,6 42,7 3,2 1,5 32,7 3,2 3,19
Slovenia 4,7 3,8 4,2 2,6 3,2 1,6 32,8 3,2 3,23
Total 4,8 3,8 3,9 2,8 3,3 1,7 32,7 3,1 3,23
SOCIAL DISTANCES TO
HYPOTHETICAL GROUPS
Generally viewed as a corollary of social trust, social distance is
usually measured on a Bogardus scale, with the intent being to
assess people’s willingness to engage in social contact with
members of diverse social groups. In our research, we measure
social distance on the basis of answers given by the respondents
to the question of how they would feel if people from certain
social groups would move to their neighbourhood. The question
is meant to evaluate the reaction of respondents at the notion of
interacting with members of various social groups. The respond-
ent can choose to answer on a scale from 1 to 5, where 1 is very
bad and 5 is very good. Similar to social trust, for the purpose of
this analysis, we will show the mean score of social distance by
social group. Here we will also add the standard deviation score
for the mean to illustrate the variation in responses.
As we can see from Table 3.10., there is a clear separation
between the acceptability of two groups. One group is made up
by relatively conventional socio-demographic categories, such as
a local family with many children or a retired couple, and is con-
sidered very socially acceptable by the respondents, with most
categories yielding mean scores over 4 on a 1-to-5 scale. The one
exception appears to be the Western family, which also scores
high compared to the other social groups analysed here, but is
significantly below the conventional Romanian national demo-
graphic groups.
TABLE 3.10: Social distance from archetype groups,
mean score from 1 to 5
How would you feel if the following would move to
your neighborhood?
Mean Std. Dev.
Local family with many children 4,24 1,10
Student group 4,16 1,13
Retired couple 4,00 1,2 2
Western family 3,41 1,38
Homosexual couple 2,43 1,47
Roma family 2,68 1,44
Refugee family 2,56 1,40
Drug addicts 1,60 1,16
Former convicts 1,71 1,21
Secondly, in the socially unacceptable group we see two levels of
rejection or projected social distance. Firstly, homosexual couples,
Roma families and refugee families tend to score around 2.5 on
the 1-to-5 scale of social distance. This could be interpreted as a
slight rejection by the respondents. Secondly, we see an over-
whelming rejection being assigned to possible neighbours who
are drug addicts or former convicts. Homosexual couples seem to
be somewhere between the two groups, somewhat closer to the
family/couple group.
34 YOUTH STUDY ROMANIA 2018/2019
Regarding the explanatory variables, socio-demographic varia-
bles tend to account for an important part of the variation in the
social distance indicator for the first group of variables, while the
second group of variables is better explained through parental
education and, therefore, family socialisation. The influence of
parental education should not be surprising in this context. As in
the situation of social trust, respondents who grow up and so-
cialise in families with a richer educational background tend to
also develop significantly more opportunities to interact with in-
dividuals from other social groups and generally tend to become
more tolerant of otherness.
DISCRIMINATION AND ITS
PERSISTENCE OVER TIME
In close connection to the previous two indicators, discrimina-
tion is also an extremely important social indicator which per-
haps partially explains feeble social trust levels and reinforces
social distance. Compared to 2014, it appears that about the
same proportion of the population feels it has been exposed to
some discrimination in recent times. About 40 per cent of re-
spondents say they have felt discriminated against at least
sometimes. What changes is the intensity of discrimination or
the proportion of respondents who say they have felt discrimi-
nated against many times, which has decreased from 18 per
cent in 2014 to 12 per cent in 2018.
Of those who feel discriminated, it is also important to note
that only 13 per cent have felt discriminated against for only one
reason. This means that more than a quarter of young Romanians
between the ages of 14 and 29 have felt discriminated against for
more than one reason, which marks how massive the problem of
intersectionality, or discrimination against the same groups for
multiple reasons, is in Romania. Most of this intersectionality brings
together issues of poverty and ethnic discrimination, and is most
likely among young ethnic Roma people. In addition, another
classic staple of intersectionality is gender and education or eth-
nicity and language spoken. More studies on this topic need to
be conducted in Romania so as to better understand the multitude
of sources of discrimination that work in conjunction to stratify
the young population.
The figures below show that discrimination is reported fairly
often among young people in the region. While Romania is not
the country which reports the highest occurrence, the levels re-
corded are still relatively high.
As in 2014, the most widely identified reason for discrimination
is one’s economic situation. Closely behind, other reasons for dis-
crimination are one’s age, one’s education and one’s gender. An
important feature in this list is definitely the fact that we are re-
cording a high level of discrimination for political beliefs even if
young people in Romania report themselves to be extremely dis-
interested in politics. This high level of discrimination on the basis
of political beliefs is yet another reason to believe that Romania
in general – and young Romanians, as a corollary – are going
through a phase of considerable political polarisation.
TABLE 3.11: Occurrence of reasons for being
discriminated against by population
Reason for discrimination
Gender 12,7
Economic 25 ,1
Age 21,4
Religious beliefs 8,7
Ethnicity 8,03
Education 13, 2
Social engagement 11, 4
Political beliefs 10,4
Regional origin 9,7
Sexual orientation 2,6
Language 5,7
Albania
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Bulgaria
Croatia
Kosovo
Macedonia
Montenegro
Romania
Serbia
Slovenia
0 % 10 % 20 % 30 % 40 % 50 % 60 % 70 % 80 % 9 0 % 100 %
FIGURE 3.6: Occurence of discrimination by country
Have you ever felt discriminated against? (Any type of discrimination)
Never Sometimes Many Times
35FAMILY, SOCIETY AND SOCIAL TRUST
Regression analyses show that the two constant confounders for
all types of discrimination that are felt by at least 10 per cent of
the sample are subjective income and educational aspirations.
Research on discrimination has long argued that people who per-
ceive themselves to be discriminated against also have a higher
propensity to perceive themselves to be poorer as an effect of
marginalisation. What is yet to be clarified in the Romanian case
is the causal mechanism behind it: are people who are poor more
likely to feel discriminated against or does discrimination make
individuals see themselves as poorer? As we have seen in a differ-
ent part of this report, subjective estimations of income have lit-
tle to do with objective measurements of goods ownership or
economic status. Poverty is very much a social construct that is
indeed heavily influenced by access to financial resources, but
has many different other facets that are not strictly economic.
Discrimination, social trust and social distance are very likely
some of these facets and their future study would be extremely
relevant for a better understanding of Romanian society.
MAIN RESULTS
— Young Romanians are strongly differentiated by level of ur-
banisation in terms of their desires to start a family. While
those who live in smaller municipalities see marriage as the
first step toward building welfare and prosperity, those living
in larger cities postpone marriage to a later date, after they
have finished their education, found a good-paying job, etc.
As a consequence of this stratification, most young married
couples tend to be extremely poor both objectively and sub-
jectively. On top of this, poor families also tend to have chil-
dren earlier, even when they were not planned and tend to
have a scant understanding or usage of contraception. About
90 per cent of respondents see themselves married with chil-
dren in the future. Most of those who do not want to marry
tend to see themselves as poor.
— While poorer respondents say they want relatively few children
and richer respondents say they want slightly more children in
the future, currently poorer respondents in smaller municipali-
ties have a rate of childbirth that is double or more than in the
case of richer respondents. Only 5 per cent of people between
the ages of 14 and 29 years of age who are living in Bucharest
report having a child, whereas about 25 per cent of those liv-
ing in municipalities with fewer than 10,000 inhabitants report
having children. The poor tend to have children earlier in their
life and economic development and may therefore be more
likely to struggle because of the birth of children. In this case, it
is imperative that public services start focusing on this demo-
graphic aspect as well in the future.
— The attitudes of young respondents toward abstinence seem
to have become slightly more permissive and young people
have become less worried. This development stems primarily
from a change of heart among young women, who are no
longer as worried about pre-marital abstinence. While in
2014 about 18 per cent of them believed that pre-marital ab-
stinence was a virtue for females only, in 2018 only about 10
per cent of them hold this belief. Similarly, while 26 per cent
of young females believe abstinence was a virtue for both
genders, the belief is now held by only 12 per cent of re-
spondents. Importantly, this development seems to no longer
be as influenced by religiosity, with even females who report
a relatively high level of church attendance having softened
their stance on pre-marital abstinence. Instead, the driver of
conservative beliefs seems to increasingly stem from a non-re-
ligious type of gender traditionalism that is present in most
regions and municipality sizes, especially in small and mid-
dle-sized cities.
— About 20 per cent of 14-to-29-year-olds report either not
knowing what contraception is or not using it in general.
Most of the respondents exhibiting this low use of contracep-
tives come from cities with populations of fewer than
100,000, especially from poorer families where neither parent
has finished high school. Although most of the persons who
report not using contraceptives are in steady relationships or
marriage, about 15 per cent of them report being single and
having an active sexual life, with multiple partners.
— Similar to 2014, young Romanians seem to be wary of
non-family social relations and tend to trust their friends,
whom they choose and can cultivate connections through,
less than they trust people in their extended family, whom
they interact with rarely. This situation is relatively unique in
the region, with only Albania and Kosovo recording a similar
constellation. Overall, social trust among young Romanians is
one of the lowest in all the countries in the region and under-
pins the marked social tension within Romanian society.
— About 40 per cent of young Romanians report having felt
discriminated against at least sometimes. What is impressive
about this is that respondents who report feeling discriminat-
ed against and who come from relatively well-educated fam-
ilies or from larger cities tend to develop significantly higher
educational aspirations. Most likely, this comes from a mech-
anism of overcompensation that has been identified with cer-
tain demographic groups in certain situations.
37
EDUCATION
The first section of this chapter examines education and covers
three main topics: the discussion of young people’s educational
status, attainment and aspirations; the performance, aspirations
and school-life experience of youth who are currently enrolled in
education and the way in which young Romanians assess the
quality of the educational system that they currently are or used
to be a part of.
A number of recent trends relating to the Romanian educa-
tional system point to both positive and worrisome developments.
In 2017, Romania’s rate of early school-leavers (the percentage of
population aged 18 – 24 whose highest attainment is lower sec-
ondary education and who are no longer involved in education
or training) was the third highest in the European Union (18.1 per
cent).
9
What is more, early school-leaving is particularly wide-
spread in rural areas.10 Rural-urban discrepancies are not limited
to early school-leaving, but are also evident at younger ages in
students’ evaluation results.11
The 2016 Human Development Report showed that in Romania,
the rate of enrolment in tertiary education in 2015 was 53 per cent.
12
In other words, more than half of the population of tertiary school
age was registered in some form of higher education. At the same
time, according to Eurostat, Romania was, in 2017, in last place
among EU countries with regard to the share of the population
aged 30 – 34 with tertiary educational attainment (26.3 per cent,
compared to the EU average of 39.9 per cent).13 Graduation from
institutions of higher education was more widespread among wom-
en in 2016; the proportion of women aged 30 – 34 who have at-
tained tertiary education exceeded that of men by 3.7 per cent.14
Romanian universities are soundly integrated in the framework
of student exchange programs; the Erasmus Plus program is ac-
cessed yearly by thousands of Romanian students who benefit
from the experience of studying abroad.15
The current report covers some of these important aspects
relating to participation in education, attainment and education-
al inequalities, with a focus on youth aged 14 to 29.
Educational status, attainment and
aspirations
We begin the presentation of FES 2018 results on education by
looking at the current educational status of youth.
Figure 4.1 shows that nearly 57 per cent of the young people
included in the sample are currently not actively enrolled in any
kind of education or training. As expected, educational status is
linked to the actual life stage of the young respondents. For ex-
ample, about 85 per cent of those from the youngest group
(14 – 18) are currently in pre-university forms of education, which
is foreseeable, given the age. As age increases, apart from the
corresponding educational status anticipated in relation to the
age group, one finds increasing percentages of youth who are not
presently enrolled in education (50 per cent among the 19 – 22
group to 91.7 per cent among the oldest ones).
How about the educational level already completed by young
Romanians? Data represented in Figure 4.2 describe their current
attainment, indicating that most respondents report having thus
far completed the secondary level of education (high school).
4
EDUCATION AND
EMPLOYMENT
38 YOUTH STUDY ROMANIA 2018/2019
We expect to find once more a visible age effect, as a normal
consequence of educational attainment depending on individu-
als’ life stage. Indeed, such a relationship is revealed by the data.
At the same time, one can observe that even in the age groups
above 18 years of age there are respondents whose highest
current level of attainment is solely primary school (although
their share is comparatively lower than in the youngest age
group and is by no means the dominant level within the specific
age intervals).
In agreement with what we already know about the gender
factor in choosing the technical/vocational track of education, the
survey data finds that more young men completed technical
schools than women. More women than men report having com-
pleted BA or MA levels of university education.
A further question for the young respondents regarded their
highest educational aspirations. Most young people aim for high-
er education (BA degree or higher) and their aspirations seem to
be influenced among other factors by gender and by their parents’
educational capital.
After eliminating non-responses, we find that 57.5 per cent of
youth aim to attain BA degrees or above. Further examination of
data also reveals associations between young people’s aspirations
and their demographic and family backgrounds. Among respond-
ents coming from families where both parents have university-lev-
el education there are no cases of aspirations to primary education
or to vocational schooling. The comparatively lower share of re-
spondents coming from university-schooled families that aim at
secondary level education (high-school) is explained by the differ-
ent distribution of youths’ orientations towards higher education
levels. In particular, university levels higher than BA (MA and PhD)
are aimed at by more respondents from well-educated families.
Region-wise, the largest shares of respondents who aim at degrees
higher than BA are found in Bucharest. MA level studies are sought
of more by women than by young men. 58.7 per cent of the entire
sample (68.8 per cent after the exclusion of non-responses) say
they are very confident that they will succeed in reaching the as-
pired educational level.
An attentive examination, based on regression analysis, allows
us to test more rigorously the impact of factors that prompt aspi-
ration to higher education (BA, MA or PhD). Accordingly, the
likelihood of aiming for a higher education degree is indeed high-
er in the case of women and increases along with parents’ edu-
cational attainment. In addition, home cultural capital (estimated
by the number of books in the parental house) exerts a significant
influence on aspiration to higher education, suggesting that
FIGURE 4.1: Current educational status among youth
(per cent of the entire sample)
60 %
50 %
40 %
30 %
20 %
10 %
0 %
I am in school / high school / voc ational school
I am an undergraduate student
I am a student in a Master’s or Doc tor’s degree program
I am enrolle d in some other form of education or training
I am not in any kind of education or training
Don’t know
No answer
21,0
13,8
2,7 1,7
56,7
0,9 3,1
No answer
Don’t know
Doctoral or post-doctoral degree
University-level e ducation: Higher than bachelor degree (MA / MSC …)
University-level education: Bachelor degree or similar
Secondary school: university-preparatory type
Vocational or technical secondary school
Primary school
No formal education / incompleted primar y school
0 % 10 % 20 % 30 % 40 % 50 % 60 % 70 % 80 %
FIGU RE 4.2: Highest educational level completed
(per cent from the entire sample)
1,7
0,4
0,2
4,0
14,4
45 ,1
9,0
22,5
2,7
39EDUCATION AND EMPLOYMENT
exposure to cultural content during the formative years has an
impact on how young people project their educational future.
The findings on the impact of gender on educational aspirations
prompted a further question about the applicability of this pat-
tern to the other countries included in the survey. Indeed, data
show that in all but two countries (Kosovo and Slovenia), higher
percentages of women than of men aspire to pursue higher edu-
cation (Figure 4.4.). This may be, at least in part, an indication of
greater pressures perceived by women to obtain through educa-
tion high qualifications that will ease their access on the labour
market or that would enhance their chances for well-remunerat-
ed jobs. It is worth to notice that Romania has the lowest propor-
tion of young women who aspire to pursue higher education
among all countries in the study, and the second lowest (after
Bosnia and Herzegovina) for young men.
Young people who are actively enrolled
in education at present
In this section, we are interested in the relationship between
young people’s current educational attainment (highest educa-
tion level already completed) and their further aspirations. Data
in Table 4.1. shows that, except for the respondents who already
possess a PhD, within each category of current attainment, there
are considerable shares of young people who aspire for levels of
education higher than that presently reached (the grey cells mark
the percentages of youth in whose case the completed educa-
tional level matches their highest aspirations).
No answer
Don’t know
University education: PhD
University education: Master
University education: Bachelor
Secondar y School: 4 or more years
Secondar y School: Up to 3 years
(vocational / technical)
Just primary school
0 % 10 % 20 % 3 0 %
FIGU RE 4.3: Highest educational level aspired
(per cent from the entire sample)
4,3
9,6
5,3
18 ,1
26,0
26,2
5,9
4,6
FIGURE 4.4: Percentages of youth from the SEE area who aspire to higher education, by gender
(excluding non-responses)
Albania
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Bulgaria
Croatia
Kosovo
Macedonia
Montenegro
Romania
Serbia
Slovenia
100 %
90 %
80 %
70 %
60 %
50 %
40 %
30 %
20 %
10 %
0 %
93,3
79,3
69,9
45,8
74,0
58,4
68 ,1
53,9
81,3 8 3,1
86,0
77, 4
80,9
70,2
65,6
49 ,1
83,7
74,1 76 ,0
81,5
Women Men
40 YOUTH STUDY ROMANIA 2018/2019
TA BL E 4 .1: Aspirations of youth currently enrolled in education according to the highest educational
level completed (per cent excluding non-responses)
Aspiration Just
primary
school
Vocational/
technical
education
High
school
University
BA
University
MA
University
PhD
Current
attainment
No formal education/
incomplete primary school
6.7 26.7 26.7 20 20
Primary school 1.3 4.4 23.8 41.9 21.9 6.9
Vocational/technical 9.1 63.6 27.3
High school 7.2 40.7 41.9 10.2
University BA 17.9 64.3 17. 9
University MA 60 40
University PhD 100
Further surveying of young respondents whose educational
training is ongoing looks at the amount of effort invested in indi-
vidual study at home. Most young people report studying at
home daily for one to two hours. There is no significant variation
regarding the time invested in individual learning depending on
the educational level at which respondents are currently enrolled.
However, more young women than men report studying at
home for about two to three hours.
Young people were also asked about their average school marks
in the past academic year. Table 4.2. shows the relationship be-
tween students’ academic performance and attributes of their
home environment. Similar percentages of the young people
who offered a valid answer regarding their average score (i.e. ex-
cluding non-responses) indicate the intervals (7 – 8) and (8 – 9) as
reflecting their most recent school results. Young women tend to
report higher average annual scores than their male counterparts.
TABLE 4.2: Students’ average scores in the past academic year (per cent excluding non-responses)
5 – 6 7 – 8 8 – 9 9 – 10 To tal
Sample 3.6 38.8 38.5 19.1 100
Parents’ education
Both parents less than high school 50 39.2 10.8 100
Other situations 5.3 38.1 38.9 17.8 100
Both parents more than high school 21.1 36.8 42.1 10 0
Assessment of household well-being
We don’t have enough money for basic bills (electricity, heating…) and food 35.7 28.6 28.6 7.1 100
We have enough money for basic bills and food, but not for clothes and shoes 42.4 45.5 12.1 10 0
We have enough money for food, clothes and shoes but not enough for more
expensive things (fridge, TV set, etc.)
3.8 47.1 37.5 11.5 10 0
We can afford to buy some more expensive things but not as expensive as car or
a flat, for instance
1.9 34.3 3 6.1 2 7. 8 100
We can afford to buy whatever we need for a good living standard 1.4 31.4 40 27.1 10 0
Sex
Male 6.8 48.4 32.3 12 .4 100
Female 131 43.7 24.4 100
* Bold-fa ced figures show s tatisticall y significant d ifferences
Data also show significant correlations between students’ perfor-
mance and their parents’ educational background, particularly
with respect to the highest scores (the interval 9 – 10); a larger
percentage of youth coming from families where both parents
have university-level education report having achieved higher
scores compared to the rest of the respondents. In addition, a
higher percentage of students who evaluate the financial status
of their household in negative terms report that their annual av-
erage is within the range of 5 to 6.
In addition, data show a strong positive correlation between
the amount of individual study at home and the annual average
scores reported by respondents (value of Gamma coefficient of
correlation 0.348).
41EDUCATION AND EMPLOYMENT
Young people’s assessment of the Romanian
education system
The respondents were asked to assess the Romanian educational
system, with reference to (1) the overall quality of education, (2)
their opinion on the existence of fraudulent practices in the ex-
amination procedures and (3) the perceived match between edu-
cational training and the job market. The results show that only a
modest share of young people report being very satisfied with
the educational system and more than a quarter strongly agree
that the evaluation system is in some cases vitiated by corruption.
About 44 per cent of young people in the survey believe that the
educational system is not well adapted to the requirements of
the job market. Approximately one-quarter of the respondents
said that they performed a practical position or internship within
the framework of their educational programme.
Assessing employability
We close with a brief section that prefaces the second part of this
chapter, related to employment, by examining from a compara-
tive perspective the way in which young people from southeast
European countries perceive their chances of finding their way
onto the labour market.
First of all, young people who are still enrolled in some form
of education were asked to assess how difficult it is to find a job
after graduation. The results in Table 4.3. show the percentages
of young people who are very optimistic about these prospects.
Romanian youth are, in this overall picture, most confident about
a successful transition to the labour market.
TABLE 4.3: Percentage of youth who think that it will be very easy to find a job after graduation
(percentages of the entire samples of educationally active youth)
Alba-
nia
Bosnia and
Herzegovi-
na
Bulgaria Croa-
tia
Kosovo Macedo-
nia
Montene-
gro
Roma-
nia
Ser-
bia
Slovenia
10.6 39.5 15 11.3 13 .9 16.9 24 16.2 13.7
TABLE 4.4: Percentage of youth who think that the educational system in their country is well
adapted to labour-market requirements (percentages of entire samples)
Alba-
nia
Bosnia and
Herzegovina
Bulgaria Croa-
tia
Kosovo Macedo-
nia
Montene-
gro
Roma-
nia
Ser-
bia
Slovenia
22.8 2 2.1 14.3 41.2 28.4 23.4 16. 2 33 21 28
Croatian and Romanian youth project the most optimistic picture
of the ability of education to provide the skills required by the
labour market.
MAIN RESULTS
— Our data show that 59 per cent of the young respondents are
not currently in any kind of education or training. In the 2014
edition of the FES survey, the share of youth no longer active
in education was 53.5 per cent.16
— There is a clear association between current educational sta-
tus and young people’s age; among young people aged 27 to
29, we find the highest share of respondents who have left
the educational system (91.7 per cent). The effect of age is
also marked in relation to respondents’ highest level of edu-
cational attainment.
— Most young people aim for higher education (BA degree or
higher) and their aspirations seem to be influenced among
other factors by gender (the likelihood to aim for a university
degree is greater in the case of women) and by parents’ edu-
cational capital.
— There are additional noticeable gender-related differences as
indicated by the data. First of all, more young women than
men report being currently enrolled as undergraduate stu-
dents and more men are at present not engaged in educa-
tional training. Secondly, more women than men report hav-
ing completed BA or MA levels of university education.
Additionally, completion of vocational or technical tracks is
reported by more young men than women.
— Regarding youth who are still enrolled in education, we
found that within each category of current attainment, large
shares of youth aspire for levels of education higher than that
already completed. About one-quarter of students enrolled
in different levels of education are very optimistic about the
perceived prospects of finding a job after graduation.
— Most students report annual average scores placed in the in-
tervals 7 – 8 (38.8 per cent) and 8 – 9 (38.5 per cent), while
Another aspect that young people were asked about, regardless
of their current educational status, relates to the match between
the preparation provided by the educational system and the
requirements of the labour market.
42 YOUTH STUDY ROMANIA 2018/2019
young women fare better than men in this respect. There are
also indications of a link between students’ results and their
parents’ education: a large percentage of youth from families
in which both parents have degrees higher than high school
report having average scores of 9 to 10. Moreover, a greater
percentage of students who assess the financial status of
their household in negative terms report that their annual
results are in the lowest score interval (5 – 6).
— About two-thirds of youth who are still active in education
consider that the day-to-day school climate is in differing de-
grees hard and stressful; data does not reveal significant dif-
ferences that current educational status or gender exert over
this perception. However, significantly higher percentages of
students whose average scores are among the lowest (5 to 6)
report that the school climate is very hard and stressful, sug-
gesting that low school performance can generate anxious
attitudes towards school.
— Strong satisfaction with the overall quality of education in Ro-
mania is reported by a modest portion of the youth surveyed
(about 15 per cent) and the general assessment of the quality
of education is related to young people’s perceptions of the
fairness of examination procedures and the match between
educational training and the requirements of the job market.
YOUTH EMPLOYMENT
The issue of high and persistent unemployment among youth in
Europe has been a recurrent phenomenon since the early 1980s,
but extremely critical in recent decades, especially after the Eco-
nomic Recession and the European Debt Crisis. In addition, ad-
dressing this issue with its specificities has become more and
more important in recent years.
One reason for this is related to the fact that the impact of
both economic and debt crises in Europe is greater on youth than
adults, especially in terms of their patterns of employment and
their unemployment rates. (Blanchflower and Freeman, 2017) In
this respect, Bell and Blanchflower (2011) pointed out that young-
sters have greater sensitivity to these phenomena mostly because
they have less specific human capital or less experience. Dolado
et. al. (2015) argued that there are a lot of differences in these
patterns among countries in Europe, and that they are mainly
caused by the type of educational system a country has (poor
school-to-work transition, high number of NEETs, vocational train-
ing) or by the type of labour market institutions a country has
(fixed-term contracts, minimum wage, etc.).
Another reason for analysing youth employment is related to
the fact that unemployment during the early stage of a working
career (and especially long-term youth employment) has a strong
negative effect on future labour outcomes. Even in the case of
short-term unemployment, going from one temporary to another
job makes youngsters unable to capitalize on their human capital
or accumulate substantial working experience. At the same time,
the depreciation of human capital takes place at particularly high-
er rates during the initial stages in the working career, and there-
fore the most common patterns of employment among youth
becomes very important for their future labour opportunities.
(Hernanz and Jimeno, 2017)
When looking at the Romanian context, the issue is even
more relevant since employment opportunities as well as la-
bour-market institutions are related to young persons’ decision
to migrate to other countries. Indeed, Horvath (2008) argues
that the migration of young people from Romania is very much
connected with their problematic and prolonged transition to
adulthood, mainly due to their difficulty in finding a job, as well
as the high level of job insecurity.
In this section, the analysis focuses on the following aspects
relating to youth and the employment market: 1) Patterns of youth
employment, 2) Aspirations vs Reality: the relation between pro-
fession, occupation and activity sector, 3) Finding and choosing a
job, 4) Voluntary initiatives.
Patterns of youth employment
More than one-third of our sample have a full-time contract (42.9
per cent) with either a permanent contract (39.6 per cent) or
temporary one (3.3 per cent). Men tend to have more full-time
contracts than women (40.9 per cent of full-time permanent con-
tracts are with men and 38.3 per cent with women). Out of all
this sample, 25.2 per cent have no job and are not looking for
one, while 9.8 per cent have no job but are not actively looking
for one. From those that do not have a job and are not looking
for one, there tend to be more women (30.1 per cent compared
to 20.6 per cent for men). In addition, women tend to be more
prevalent than men in the category of those who are undergoing
occupational training (5.8 per cent out of the total sample). Even
though the sample focuses only on youth, 3.5 per cent of them
mentioned that they are self-employed.
From all the regions in Romania, young people living in Tran-
sylvania have the highest percentage of permanent full-time con-
tracts as well as the lowest unemployment rate. At the same time,
young people from Moldova tend to have a higher percentage of
occasional/temporary jobs, as well as the highest unemployment
rates. This could be explained as being due to the large percentage
of rural areas in that region, as well as the prevalence of agriculture
as main economic sector in the region. Not surprisingly, the young-
er respondents are, the lesser their chance of obtaining any form
of employment. In addition, men tend to have lower rates of
unemployment and more full-time contracts or occasional jobs
than women.
A rather alarming situation regarding youth unemployment in
European Union is that of the NEETs, an acronym which designates
persons who are not enrolled in education or undergoing other
forms of training, nor are they employed. In 2016, for instance,
almost one in five (18.3 per cent) of youngsters aged 20 – 34 were
not in employment or undergoing education or training.
17
The
current study shows that in 2018, in Romania, 12.3 per cent of
43EDUCATION AND EMPLOYMENT
young people (15 – 29) were NEETs. The figures are smaller than
the EU average because the present study also included the 15 – 18
age group, which is mostly enrolled in some form of education.
The chart below also shows that a significant percentage of
young people in poorer countries of the region, especially –Alba-
nia, Kosovo and BiH – are not undergoing schooling or training,
nor are they in employment. An interesting situation is the case
of Romania, where even though young people are in better so-
cio-economic situation than persons in the countries mentioned
above, there is a large percentage of young people who are neither
in the educational system or employed.
Those who are employed work on average 38.82 hours per week,
while 72.9 per cent of these persons work 40 hours or less. Male
respondents work, on average, 3 more hours than women, while
those living in Moldova work, on average, one hour more than
the total population included in the study. In terms of age, the
younger people are, the fewer hours they work. Youngsters be-
tween 14 – 18 work on average 21.93 hours a week, while those
between 27 – 19 work 41.08 hours per week.
As mentioned in the previous section, almost 35 per cent of the
sample have no job, while a quarter of persons surveyed are not
even looking for one. In terms of the reasons for unemployment,
13.9 per cent of the unemployed believe that there was no appro-
priate job in their region, while 11 per cent indicated that their
educational level was not high enough. Youngsters living in Tran-
sylvania and Moldova are more critical towards themselves and
their education than respondents in Bucharest in terms of the
reasons for not finding the appropriate job.
Aspirations vs reality: the relationship
between profession, occupation and activity
sector
Data show that Romanian youngsters (15 – 29) tend to be in a
position to work at a job that is not what they have been trained
for. While 31 per cent stated that they work in their occupation,
more than one-third of respondents (36.6 per cent) do not work
in their area of educational training. In addition, men tend to
work more in occupations which they have not been trained for
(39.3 per cent compared to 33.5 per cent for women). This is
most probably related to the fact that men also tend to be en-
gaged more in part-time jobs. Still, an interesting fact is that 14
per cent of the respondents state that they have not been trained
in any profession. This reveals again, their rather pessimistic ap-
proach towards the education system.
As data show there is a trend in all SEE countries for young
people to work in jobs that are not in their line of occupation. The
average for SEE countries is 42.5 per cent, while the highest per-
centage is for both Serbia and Kosovo (55 per cent).
FIGURE 4.5: Percentage of NEETs (15 – 29) in the
region
30 %
20 %
10 %
0 %
Slovenia
Serbia
Montenegro
Bulgaria
Macedonia
Croatia
Romania
BiH
Kosovo
Albania
568910 11 12
20
24 25
FIGURE 4.6: Average working hours by gender,
age and regions
Female
Male
14 – 18
19 – 22
23 – 26
27 – 29
Bucharest
Moldova
Total
37, 22
40,07
21,93
34,72
39,95
41,08
37, 67
41,25
38,82
Average working hours per week
FIGURE 4.7: Percentage of youngsters in SEE who do
not work in their line of occupation
Bulgaria
Croatia
Romania
Slovenia
SEE Average
Macedonia
Montenegro
Albania
BiH
Serbia
Kosovo
18
60 %
50 %
40 %
30 %
20 %
10 %
0 %
36 37
42 42,5 43 45 46 48
55 55
44 YOUTH STUDY ROMANIA 2018/2019
At the same time, one in five young Romanians (21.8 per cent)
consider themselves to be overqualified for their jobs. The fact that
such a high percentage of them do not work in their occupation or
feel that they are overqualified for their jobs may lead to dissatis-
faction and to lower predictability in terms of future career.
Looking at the entire SEE region, one can easily see that
over-education is another dimension of a skills mismatch (Figure
4.8). As data shows, it constitutes a significant problem in Kosovo,
Serbia, Albania and BiH – countries which register some of the
poorest labour market performance in the region. The high prev-
alence in Slovenia could be explained by a high incidence of part-
time employment.
Finding and choosing a job
When it comes to finding a new job, young Romanians believe that
the most important thing is to have a good level of education (54.6
per cent), followed by luck (53 per cent) and acquaintances, like
friends and relatives in good positions (44.3 per cent). The least
important factors are education and work expertise (22.6 per cent)
and party membership (13.4 per cent). Still, when comparing re-
gions, one can easily identify some important differences. In terms
of the importance of acquaintances and good connections, young
people living in Bucharest and Walachia consider these to be more
important than those persons living in Transylvania or Moldova do.
In a similar way, they also attach the greatest value to having a
good level of education. An interesting result is that there is a
greater percentage of young people living in Transylvania than the
percentage of the total population who consider party member-
ship to be an important aspect in finding a job. (15 per cent com-
pared to 13.4 per cent of the total population).
When asked what are the things that value the most when
choosing a job, the respondents attach the greatest value to job
security (84.2 per cent) and the income/salary they receive
(82.5 per cent) or even the career opportunities a job can offer
them in the future (73.4 per cent).
Voluntary initiatives
Only 12.4 per cent of young Romanians have volunteered in the
last 12 months, compared to 31 per cent of young people in the
European Union18 (Figure 4.9). Still, the younger they are, the
more engaged they are in voluntary activities (15.7 per cent in the
age group 14 – 18 compared to 9.4 per cent in age group 27 – 29).
At the same time, girls tend to be more engaged in voluntary
activities than boys.
Out of those persons who were involved in voluntary activities, al-
most half of them engaged in school/university activities. This is
not surprising, as the vast majority of our respondents are enrolled
in some form of education. In addition, with a substantially lower
percentage, they are either involved in associations and clubs (9.6
per cent), in non-governmental organisations (11 per cent) or other
youth organisations (10.3 per cent). They are the least involved in
labour unions (1.3 per cent) and political parties (3.5 per cent).
Kosovo
Serbia
Albania
Slovenia
Montenegro
BiH
Macedonia
Romania
Bulgaria
Croatia
0 % 10 % 20 % 30 % 40 % 50 % 60 % 70 % 80 % 9 0 % 100 %
FIGURE 4.8: Formal education requirements applying to young people’s jobs in the SEE region
(per cent from the entire sample)
Require s a lower level of forma l education comp ared to yours
Is in line wi th your achieve d level of formal edu cation
Require s a higher level of for mal educatio n compared to you rs
44 46 11
37 55 6
37 57 6
33 59 8
31 64 5
28
25
22
21
17
63
62
70
76
80
9
13
9
3
3
FIGURE 4.9: Engagement in voluntary associations by
Romanian youth (per cent)
Female
Male
14 – 18
19 – 22
23 – 26
27 – 29
Total
14,3
30 %
20 %
10 %
0 %
10,6
15,7
11, 0
13,9
9,4
12,4