Educational inequalities and educational paths construction of 11-15 teenagers in their everyday life spaces. – INEDUC

The comparative aspect of this project, which studies quantitatively three regional territories (Aquitaine, Lower Normandy and Brittany), and qualitatively, and local selected spaces in those regions, all aim to enrich knowledge about the diversity of educational policies and the different effects on the educational trajectories of teenagers. The longitudinal dimension of these trajectories will be analysed differently according to the three types of educational backgrounds we chose.
In this research program, we make 2 surveys :
- A quantitative survey by questionnaires
- A qualitative survey with teenagers and their parents : interviews, focus-groups and theater-forum

This program clearly wishes to produce new knowledge on contexts and living conditions of teenagers, on the increasing diversity of their frames of socialization and learning, by crossing three essential dimensions of their educational environment : school, leisure activities, digital resources. We wish to enlighten the diversity of producing mechanisms of educational disparities, persuaded that they are translated by important distances from living conditions between the individuals. It is a major economic and social stake, in particular for a period when school difficulties, social and cultural disparities are regularly cancelled as causes of disparities of insertion and of access employment for youth generations.

The results of these works will help decisions in public policies which fight against educational inequalities, by bringing recommendations to make public action more successful.
On the theoretical plan, this project wishes to contribute on fundamental thought on inequality, especially with its interdisciplinary approach. The rising place of this theme of inequality in the public debate required rigorous scientific approach to grasp this multidimensional and complex phenomenon. The results of our investigations will thus allow to renew the knowledge, in particular on educational trajectories construction.

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This project aims to identify the inequalities in education between the teenagers from 11 to 15 (junior high-school time in France) years old from different backgrounds. Education can be seen as the acquisitions resulting from the interactions between the individual and his physical and social environment, including the deliberate transmission as well as the imprinting.

Our goal is to analyse different backgrounds that influence the educational path of teenagers : school, sports and cultural hobbies, and another background that echoes both school and hobbies, the digital environment. We will specifically focus on the spatial aspect of theses contexts, be it by the analysis of metric distances or by the social and cultural ones. The metric distance analysis is characterised by the identification of the territorial services distribution, of the proximity of these services for the populations, and of the physical constraint inherent to the necessary movements to access these services. The analysis of social and cultural distances includes the study of the characteristics of the families, of the local backgrounds and of the educational policies implemented in always particular administrative and territorial units. These characteristics, by causing different kinds of use of these local resources, create differences in the social histories of the teenagers.

Because of the lack of efficient preventive restorative actions, these differences imply inequalities which summed in space and temporal dimensions can endanger social cohesion. Identifying the different mechanisms that construct these inequalities and their consequences can provide useful theoretical tools to promote the development and each teenager's potential so that he can play a role in his personal development as well as in social development.

The comparative aspect of this project, which studies quantitatively three regional territories (Aquitaine, Basse-Normandie, Bretagne), and qualitatively, local selected spaces in those regions, all aim to enrich the knowledges about the diversity of educational policies and the different effects on the educational histories of the teenagers. The longitudinal dimension of these histories will be analysed differently according to the three types of educational backgrounds we chose.