Fostering social inclusion of marginalized youths across Europe: a multilevel analysis of the individual, interpersonal, community-related, and contextual drivers within the EU-funded project YouCount

Across Europe, many youths are at risk of being left out of society. The EU-funded project YouCount (Horizon 2020) aims at fostering social inclusion of marginalized youths (15-29 years old) across 9 countries and 10 case studies by creating youth-friendly communities using a Citizen Science approach (Jorgensen et al., 2022). Social inclusion is a complex, dynamic, and multidimensional phenomenon which depends on the context and on the characteristics of the community where it happens (Giarè et al., 2020; Moyano et al., 2020; Yang et al., 2019) as well as on the characteristics of the involved individuals and social groups; consistently, it needs to be addressed at several different yet intertwined levels (individual, interpersonal, community-related, contextual). Nevertheless, while several definitions of social inclusion are available in the established literature and frame it based on different perspectives and approaches, studies addressing it as a complex, multilevel construct are only few and do not deepen the intertwinement of the many factors and levels that may affect it. Moving from this gap and building upon the data gathered across the 10 case studies in YouCount, this contribution will provide a multilevel framework for addressing the complexities related to social inclusion dynamics with specific reference to youths. A psychosocial model for social inclusion of youth will be presented too. The theoretical and practical implications of the proposed framework will be discussed, since having a multilevel model of social inclusion allows to implement interventions tackling it considering its complexities and the several intertwined dimensions it involves.