Do Social Media Data predict changes in young adults’ employment status? Evidence from Italy

This study addresses the conditions in which young Italian people find themselves during the active job search via Social Media Data. Focusing especially on NEETs, the aims of the study are: 1) to predict the changes in employment status from traditional information by using the longitudinal representative survey Rapporto Giovani; 2) to identify the target population inferring from their online digital traces; 3) to predict changes in employment status from social media data. We tried to predict the employment status transitions based on the digital behaviour using a new Facebook application, LikeYouth, that gathers information regarding Facebook profile and Likes on Facebook Pages of each user.