Wishing well: a data-driven investigation of Italian adolescents’ wishes and trust in the future

Global challenges such as the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, and political instability are severely testing adolescents' ability to plan for their future, potentially compromising their successful transition to subsequent stages of life. The Italian context presents additional risk factors, including a high proportion of young people not engaged in education, employment, or training; barriers to young women's participation in the labor market; and demographic trends that threaten the long-term sustainability of the national economy and society. In 2022, an Italian social promotion association initiated a dialogue with high school students in the Metropolitan City of Milan to identify possible actions to support them. The initiative also included a large, unstructured survey. Despite the absence of validated instruments or pre-specified hypotheses, this study took the opportunity to undertake an exploratory analysis aimed at extracting the fullest possible meaning from the collected data. The proposed fully data-driven approach included natural language processing techniques to analyze open-ended responses and regularized multiple regression using the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator to reveal themes and associations that theory-based surveys might miss but that hold practical relevance for parents, educators, and policymakers. In our sample of 363 students, topic modeling of unstructured responses reporting the adolescents’ most significant wishes identified 8 main themes and suggested a possible generational shift from traditional aspirations toward priorities centered on self-actualization. Time spent with friends and school motivation emerged from the regression analysis as protective factors for trust in the future, while perceived youth distress emerged as the strongest risk factor.