Tuesday 16th July
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Measurements of immigration status in cross-national surveys |
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| Convenor | Dr Bogdan Voicu (Romania Academy of Science & University L.Blaga of Sibiu) |
Most of the contemporary large-scale surveys include some measurement of respondent's immigration status. In the past, being or not being born in the country of interviewing was the only information collected. Most recent waves of EVS and ESS added questions on the actual country of birth, both for respondent and for his/her parents and spouse. Can such information be efficiently employed to study immigrants, or to control for the immigration status when analyzing the overall population? Is it accurate enough? How can one overcome the existing limitations (e.g. under-representation of illegal immigrants)? Are the measurements similar in different (European) countries? Do they lead to comparable and reliable indicators? This section plans to bring together both methodological reflections and substantial research which make use of the immigration variables existing in comparative surveys. Papers dealing using large-scale datasets are at the core of the section. Analyses based on surveys of smaller clusters of countries, including the ones targeted on immigrants, are also welcome.
In migrant-related research defining who counts as migrant is of crucial importance. Nationality and country of birth are the two criteria most commonly applied to define the migrant population. The former operationalizes migrants as foreign-nationals whereas the latter as foreign-born individuals. These definitions have substantial differences primarily due to the migration policies governing the acquisition of the national citizenship in diverse host countries. The lack of equivalence in defining migrants based on the foreign-born and citizenship criterion has critical consequences on the collected data and the empirical conclusions derived from the analysis of such data. Consequently, diverse definitions of migrants have significant effects on understanding migrant-related issues and in turn evaluating and designing policies. The main rationale of the paper is to explore the impact of different definitions of migrants that combine both nationality status and country of birth on the exploration of intra-group relations in two countries with diverse migrant-policies, i.e. Sweden and Greece. The study uses data from all the European Social Survey (ESS) rounds of the two countries under study and the analyses indicate significant differences in the proxies of evaluating intra-group relations between the mutually exclusive migrant categories of foreign-born citizens and foreign-born non-citizens. It is recommended that migrant-related researchers should always take account of the potential impact of migrants' operationalizations on their research outcomes in order to determine the adequacy of their conclusions in designing effective policy initiatives.
Research knowledge about 'mixed' people depends on the questions about that topic asked by researchers. Mixed people are difficult to study in a comparative perspective, first because they need to be identified according to comparable criteria and second because their sample size is often small, especially in international datasets where the sample size of each country is restricted. Because data has been collected on different ethnic group categories in different countries, comparability across countries is difficult. National contexts indeed influence integration process of migrants and their descents but also immigration to the country itself. Rich contextual information is necessary to compare mixed people using large-scale datasets, especially when doing secondary analyses. Just as national context strongly influences the study of mixedness because it shapes researchers' thinking, it also determines the categorisation of data in large-scale surveys. The choice of questions made by the producers of large-scale datasets is influenced by national history, national laws and national conceptions of the 'Other'. In this paper, I will take the examples of, in turn, Germany, France and Britain to explore how quantitative surveys are shaped by their specific national contexts, and draw some conclusions about the impact of this on the possibilities for cross-national comparison of populations of mixed origin. Each national case will be analysed to show, compare and contrast, the process of how social and political context over time shapes the different variables and available datasets allowing the study of mixed people.
Attitudes towards gender equality are acquired during primary socialization, but they are permanently exposed to changes due to transformation in individual or societal context. Previous research shows that although sometimes the individual or societal context changes in a direction that should lead to positive attitudes regarding gender equality, such as increasing in female labor force participation, educational achievement or legislation that encourage gender equality, people preserve their original attitudes and continue 'doing gender'. Migration can offer a good opportunity to see whether the attitudes change when context changes or people preserve their attitudes inculcated by primary socialization in their country of origin. Therefore, we test two alternative hypotheses: exposure versus transferability in case of immigrants residing in European countries. Using data coming from European Social Survey we investigate what factors have the most important effect on attitude towards gender equality: those from the host country or those from origin. We have employed cross-classified multilevel regression models and we have control for the individual relevant variable to better depict the effect of societal factors like: level of gender equality, democratization and general development at both origin and destination.
Ethnic educational inequality is a widespread empirical phenomenon characterizing numerous school systems throughout the world. In Germany, too, these differences are pronounced. The data gathered in the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) provide an exceptional opportunity to describe the evolution of ethnic educational inequalities at different stages in the school career and across the life course and to uncover their origins.
A central precondition for complementing this task is the identification of the immigrant population. Since the adequacy of a certain measure largely depends on the specific research question, the relevant characteristics cannot be fixed a priori. Therefore, the NEPS includes a whole set of potential "immigrant identifiers" that, depending on the research interest, may be used. Important measures are the country of birth of the target person and of his or her parents as well as grandparents. Other criteria include nationality, immigration and residence status, naturalization or the language spoken at home and in other contexts.
In our contribution, we will provide an overview on the various measures included in the NEPS and illustrate different ways of identifying immigrants. We also discuss the problems associated with different ways of operationalization and show how the groups identified as immigrants vary when using one definition as opposed to another. The results are based on NEPS data from four starting cohorts: Kindergarten, fifth grade, ninth grade and adults.
Since several decades, Western European countries are receiving vast immigration flows leading to high levels of ethnic diversity in these societies. While integration research assumes processes of assimilation over successive immigrant generations, many large-scale data sets are unable to identify descendants of immigrants beyond the second generation, mainly due to lacking data on grandparents' birthplaces. However, defining the immigrant status of the third generation seems to be essential, as many integration processes are not completed until this or even subsequent generations. Disregarding a comprehensive measure of immigrants' generational status beyond the second generation may therefore mistakenly reject slow, but actually existing intergenerational integration. Using data from the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Survey in Four European Countries (CILS4EU), our contribution aims at investigating intergenerational adaption processes in major integration dimensions, thereby focusing on potential biases resulting from different categorizations of the 14-year old respondents of the study as immigrants or natives, depending on whether information on the country of birth of the grandparents is used or not. First results show that the majority of immigrant children in all survey countries are first or second generation immigrants, though a considerable share in our sample has two survey country-born parents, but at least one grandparent born abroad (third generation). Furthermore, the results demonstrate the importance of fine-grained measures in order to address questions of intergenerational integration processes. Finally, multivariate analyses reveal systematic biases if respondents are categorized as immigrants only on the basis of their parents' country of birth.