Secondary Students’ Subjective Wellbeing in Barcelona: From School to Future Careers

The study presented in this chapter focuses on the educational and job aspirations of young people at the end of compulsory education and its relationship with young people’s subjective wellbeing by integrating these relationships into the network formed by the other dimensions of young people’s school experience and sociodemographic variables. The data analyzed come from the longitudinal study International Study of City Youth, a sample of 2056 tenth grade students who were followed from the academic year 2013–2014 to 2016–2017 in the city of Barcelona. Different multivariate techniques have been applied, in particular, a multilevel regression model, to see the relationship between emotional wellbeing and occupational aspirations, and a structural equation model and latent transition analysis to see the evolution of this relationship over the time studied. The main results are that subjective wellbeing is related to engagement at school, as well as to some leisure time activities, and that the improvement in wellbeing occurs more in vocational training pathways and in young people starting from more vulnerable situations. It has also been shown that there is a relationship between higher subjective wellbeing and higher career aspirations, which may compensate for poor educational attainment.