‘Doing transitions’ in and through education: towards an interactive understanding of educational trajectories

This (concluding) chapter aims to theorise the empirical findings gathered in the different empirical steps of the GOETE project and their thematic analysis throughout the report Education and Life course. The focus is on the transitions of young people from lower to upper secondary school or vocational training; the degree to which they are structured by social inequalities, the ways in which they are institutionalised and supported by guidance programmes in different education systems, how they build on earlier transitions and transition experiences and how they take shape in individual constellations of decision-making. Such decision-making is not understood in terms of an individualistic choice, as conceptualised by rational choice theories, but as complex negotiations between different actors in which individual agency and structural factors interact. The chapter relates the different steps of analysis undertaken in the report corresponding to different levels of the structuring of educational trajectories in terms of a qualitative multilevel analysis. This is followed by comparative analysis aimed at contextualising these interactions and reconstructing their meaning and function in different societal contexts. The final sections consist of outlining future research as well as implications of an interactionist view on educational trajectories for policy and practice.