NEET Narratives and Youth Re-Engagement: A Social Media Analysis from a Digital Community on Reddit

This study examines how young people who self-identify as NEET in the UK make sense of learning, work, and employability.

Recent statistics show that nearly one million 16 to 24-year-olds in the UK are currently not in education, employment or training (NEET). Long periods of being NEET can significantly affect individuals’ well-being, economic opportunities, and future life chances. Although policy initiatives such as the Youth Guarantee aim to re-engage this group through guaranteed training or paid work, these initiatives often overlook the deeply-rooted structural barriers that hinder participation and engagement. Moreover, the NEET label itself has become a reductionist and stigmatising category, limiting understanding of young people’s lived experiences. Against these socio-economic challenges young people are facing and shifting policy priorities, this project aims to explore how young people who self-identify as NEET discuss and make sense of learning, work, employability, and job designs within the Reddit r/NEET community. Using social media data, the study uses a mixed-methods approach combining Natural Language Processing (NLP) for topic modelling with qualitative critical discourse analysis of user-generated posts and comments. This design enables both large-scale mapping of key discussion themes and in-depth interpretation of peer narratives. The project contributes to more individual-centred and context-sensitive understandings of NEET experiences, moving beyond reductionist statistical approaches to capture youth voices.