The European Discussion on Youth Work 2015-2020

Abstract

Following a lexical search of keywords, the general overview identifies trends in the analysed documents. These trends relate both to the conceptual basics of youth work and to the societal challenges that youth work is responding to. Whereas a keyword like "youth worker" is continuously mentioned in all documents over all years, other keywords follow trends, for example "refugee", which increases from 2018 onwards. Comparing political to professional documents show that political documents focus slightly more on conceptual keywords rather than on keywords associated with societal challenges, whereas professional documents focus slightly more on societal challenges. In summary, the general overview provides a specific pattern of topics that have been discussed in the European institutional discourse on youth work during the past five years: the relationship between youth work and overriding societal challenges; youth work and its support to young people in their personal development; and the framework conditions for youth work that support the previous two discourses. Following this pattern, the paper is divided in three more content-related chapters: the importance of youth work for society; supporting personal development as an important strategy for youth work; and the conceptual basics of youth work.