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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Qualitative Studies of Young People’s Quality of Life in Urban and Rural Areas

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description

The chapter presents a qualitative research conducted with young people from different communities: rural and urban. We sought to recognize and define dimensions that promote life satisfaction in the community, young people perceived in these two geographical areas. While the quality of life refers to both social welfare and psychological well-being, qualitative studies are particularly focused on the latter, as they facilitate the discovery of feelings, perceptions, opinions and emotions about the reality of their quality of life, being these that constitute the research itself, so that subjectivity and inter subjectivity in qualitative methodology is conceived as the ultimate means and tools for human realities and meanings that these are given. The main features of qualitative methods were considered for the study were: its inductive, flexible, holistic perspective, interaction with the participants, search for meaning and understanding of the phenomenon studied from the framework of the young (looking make sense of social reality constructed), selection of participants based on what was intended to meet, insertion in the actual context where the phenomenon occurs, the validity by the proximity of the empirical world (participants are affected by the phenomenon that is under study), the researcher craftsmanship (for production results presets). Semi-structured interviews were used for data collection, this being an instrument capable of adapting to different personalities, in the case of young people studying, working well with his words, his ways of feeling, beliefs and desires. Through this technique, the research work was organized through themes of reflection and from guiding questions (script) in order to generate an interactive process and incremental move. The method used for data analysis was the thematic analysis serving for encoding this information, which subsequently allowed the construction of social meanings.