In this article we analyze the transition process to adult life, in particular the achievement of the autonomy of young people who live in a situation of job inse-curity, in three different institutional contexts of three European countries: Ger-many, Italy, Poland. The countries involved in the study represent different wel-fare regimes in Europe (Esping-Andersen, 1990; 2000): the familistic one of Southern Europe (Italy), the conservative-corporative one (Germany) and the post-communist hybrid one (Kazepov and Carbone, 2018) of Eastern Europe (Po-land). Becoming an adult puts in play, in fact, macro elements, such as cultural and institutional references, meso resources, social and family relationships, and micro, related to the ability to activate personal resources to deal with job and economic uncertainty. In the article, the three levels of analysis are reconstructed and related through a comparative qualitative methodology that connects the macro institutional context to micro-qualitative data to identify social mecha-nisms.
Keywords: Youth, autonomy, adulthood, job insecurity