Prolégomènes pour l’étude de l’engagement des jeunes dans diverses sphères de vie : réflexions conceptuelles et esquisse d’opérationnalisation

Today, the word “commitment” abounds as an injunction in ambient discourse and in public and associative intervention with young people in various spheres of life (studies, work, etc.), in addition to the civic field. In this article, Gallant lays the foundations for cross-disciplinary research on this notion. First, she points out that these injunctions are generally aimed at the young person’s personal posture, apprehended individually, i.e. without taking into account either his or her context, situation and resources or personal preferences, or the receptiveness of his or her environment to his or her ways of getting involved, nor the tug-of-war that can exist between multiple commitments. Gallant then proposes a refined definition of commitment, enabling it to be used systematically to observe various spheres of life. Conceptualizing commitment as a personal posture also shows how normative expectations weighing on young people have a moral, not to say moralistic, dimension. Finally, the author proposes a research program aimed at empirically studying the temporalities of young people’s involvement in various spheres of life simultaneously during their transition to adulthood. While taking into account a plurality of social contexts and a diversity of young people’s situations, such a program would make it possible to document the entanglement between spheres of life, in the face of an unattainable requirement of full simultaneous engagement in all these spheres.