YOUTH 2020 - The position of young people in Slovenia

Introduction  25 TOMAŽ DEŽELAN AND MIRAN LAVRIČ INTRODUCTION THE FRAMEWORK OF THE YOUTH 2020 STUDY The Mladina 2020 study was created on the basis of a public tender by the Office of the Republic of Slovenia for Youth with the aim of conduct- ing a study that would offer insights into changes in the social profile of Slovenian young people, maintain comparability with previous research in this field (Mladina 2000 and Mladina 2010), and ensure adherence to the principles of evidence-based public policies. The study was carried out by a consortium of two public higher education institutions, namely the University of Maribor (Faculty of Arts) and the University of Ljubljana (Faculty of Social Sciences), under the coordination of Prof. Miran Lavrič and Prof. Tomaž Deželan. The study’s field implementationwas supported by the Slovenian market research agency Aragon d. o. o. The current study is a continuation of widely recognised, long-running, and high-quality ongoing research on young people in Slovenia, which is based mainly on periodic empirical youth research supported by the government. In this context, it is worth mentioning the study Mladina 2000 headed by Prof. Vlado Miheljak and Mladina 2010, led by Prof. Miran Lavrič. In addition to the aforementioned studies, the reference framework of the Mladina 2020 survey includes previous research on young people and youth in this field, which has traditionally come from the University of Ljubljana’s Faculty of Social Sciences (e.g. Youth and Ideology (Ule, 1988), Future of Youth (Ule and Miheljak, 1995), Youth in the 1990s: Analysis of the Situation in Slovenia (Ule, 1996a)), as well as a wave of new studies conducted by the coordinators of this research group in the last decade (e.g. Youth in South Eastern Europe, Substantive Youth Representation, Youth Progress Index, Research-based analysis of Youth in Action, etc.).