Alargamiento de la juventud e identidad : un estudio de los procesos de transición a la vida adulta de jóvenes en Brasil y España

In this paper we investigate the relationship between youth prolongation in Brazilian and Spanish youngsters and the identity construction processes of these individuals. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 50 young men and women aged 25 to 29 years, half of them from Madrid/Spain and the other half from Fortaleza/Brazil. The interviews were recorded and transcribed, the speeches were organized with the Atlas-ti program through a semantic content analysis. We assume that the postponement of the thresholds of transition to adulthood leads to new experiences, discourses and meanings of "being young", creating a new ideal-typical model of "prolonged youth" and turning it into a possibility of identifcation for a signifcant group of young people. In Spain, the youth prolongation is a much more pronounced and evident phenomenon than in Brazil. However, the movement towards a youth prolongation, especially concerning the "feeling younger for longer" is also a trend among young Brazilians.