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Injustice, Uselessness, and Illness: A Qualitative Study of Unemployed Graduates’ Lives in Iran

Formal education in Iran, especially higher education, has been a means to smoothen the road to social mobility, provide good jobs, and boost people’s earnings. Now, being a university graduate and remaining unemployed is regarded as a challenge. In addition, governments consider this new unemployment a threat to their legitimacy. It seems that young unemployed graduates experience different problems in their social lives. This study aims to investigate the problems encountered by young unemployed graduates and to identify which aspects of situation provide a threatening condition for the society and government. This study has adopted a qualitative approach to answer these questions. It has been conducted in a Kurdish-Iranian context. The authors used a sample of 22 unemployed graduates and conducted semi-structured interviews with each of the sample members. The data gathered from the interviews were analyzed using the qualitative content analysis method. There emerged several themes that described the unemployed graduates’ lives. Findings show that the definition of job is gender based. Unemployment is interpreted as “illness,” “uselessness,” and “social injustice.” To cope with the unemployment issue, the unemployed graduates have to follow different strategies, including “seclusion,” “continuing education,” or “restarting education.” They experience in such a context different psychological, interactive, and behavioral challenges that sometimes make them adopt an anti-social position. The findings of this research contribute to a clearer understanding of the pathological aspects of unemployed graduates’ lives, which is considered a threat from their own viewpoints.