A scoping review of research on coordinated pathways towards employment for youth in vulnerable life situations
Therese Saltkjel, Tone Alm Andreassen, Sølvi Helseth, Renate Minas
Abstract
For youth in vulnerable life situations, pathways to employment can be challenging, suggesting the need for coordinated services. The aim of this review is to explore the existing research on coordinated services for youth in vulnerable life situations. Considering the heterogenous nature of the literature, we adopted a scoping review methodology. We selected works from a base of 92 papers on youth, coordinated services, and pathways to work that were published in English during the period of 1990 to 2018. Additionally, to identify research streams, we performed a bibliometric analysis using VOSviewer to create network maps based on shared terms in the papers’ titles and abstracts. The synthesised findings show two streams of research that we refer to by the following narrative titles: (1) ‘Enabling transition to adulthood for youth with disabilities or severe health problems’, and (2) ‘Preventing the social exclusion of youth at risk’. The first stream seems to represent a more established area(s) of research, while the second stream appears to be more fragmented. The life situations of the youth in both streams, however, overlap, indicating possibilities for knowledge exchange, such as social workers engaging in policy practices and advancing efforts towards enacting system changes.