Tuesday 16th July
Wednesday 17th July
Thursday 18th July
Friday 19th July
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Mixed Methods in Migration Research: Challenges, Innovations and Applications 1 |
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| Convenor | Dr Rossalina Latcheva (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights) |
The pleas for improvement in the quality and quantity of the data available for the study of migration are not new. In 2009, the expert group of the Centre for Global Development even specified a handful of practical and politically feasible priority actions that could be taken by institutions to greatly expand the availability, quality and quantity of the information about the movement of populations across the globe. What is new is the beginning of an intensified methodological debate on the necessity of interdisciplinary or mixed methods approaches and methodological innovations in migration research. This becomes visible in increasing publishing activities such as the release of edited books (e.g. "Handbook of Research Methods in Migration" in 2012) or of special issues in peer-reviewed journals dealing with issues of migration and the combination of methods necessary to catch its complexity. Well-known migration scholars, economists, social geographers and scholars in transnational studies persuasively show that in order to build more holistic and comprehensive approach to the study of migration we require more sophisticated and broadly conceived sets of methods grounded in an interdisciplinary framework, i.e. the complexities and nuances of transnational lives require triangulating research.
The aim of the proposed session is to bring together researchers that try to overcome the weaknesses of more traditional approaches to migration by relying on multiple instruments and methods for analysing populations different to define, catch and follow, and which are marked by multiple and shifting identities. Since the use of mixed methods may cause tensions and faces its specific challenges, the exchange of knowledge and experiences during the conference are of particular importance. The session organizer is going to make efforts to (co)edit successful contributions and make suggestions for a special issue in e.g. Journal of Mixed Methods Research.
Building on the so-called ethnosurvey, this paper proposes a concrete mixed-methods design for studying transnational social relations that go beyond but are nonetheless structured and mediated by nation-states. The argument is developed on the basis of a concrete research puzzle: the question of how recent developments in European citizenship regimes are intertwined with new patterns of labour market segmentation in the context of the enlarged EU. In a first step, the need for qualitative as well as quantitative research data for enquiring this kind of phenomena is established. Second, shortcomings of existing data-sources are discussed, with a focus on data from established large-scale survey programmes. Third, the ethnosurvey is identified as a starting point for an appropriate research design. The ethnosurvey has been repeatedly proposed as a distinct mixed-methods approach to studying migrant populations from the 1980s onwards. However, a number of important adjustments are required in order to capture the interplay of political (citizenship) and economic (labour market) relations in the European context. Multi-sited ethnography and respondent-driven sampling methods are discussed as crucial complementing elements. In conclusion, the potential benefits of the proposed research design are discussed in comparison to alternative research designs. I argue that the adapted ethnosurvey design takes important general methodological challenges of (transnational) migration research into account; it can therefore be applied to different research questions.
Transnational financial professionals are highly mobile and economically sound-- their choice of spatial preferences regarding social and economic activities in specific places but also residential choices within a city (in this case: Tokyo) significantly impacts the real estate market and thus the urban landscape. To geographically locate and grasp the spatial dimension of transnational migration in a tangible map, both micro-level qualitative data collected by semi-structured interviews, accompanied by mental maps and further complemented by audio- and visual field mappings, as well as meso- to macro-scale quantitative data using methods of geodemography and other urban economic data.
The mixed-methods approach applied in our research project TRANSLAB is designed to investigate recent cross-border labour mobility in the Central European Region. Following up on established mixed-methods-approaches in migration research our data collection methodology consists of three substantive complementary components: (1) qualitative biographical interviews (2) a standardized survey to collect biographical and event-history data and (3) expert knowledge through surveys of EURES employees, business owners, local political leaders and administrative officials in border regions. The research is additionally guided by the methodological potential of recent life-course and social stratification research.
There have been plenty general discussions in anthropology about participant observation method and the role of anthropologist in the field during the research. Raised questions were manly related to what extend does anthropologist have to participate in the field and how to find the balance between participation and observation of people's life. But what about the specific of conducting ethnographic fieldwork within society of which anthropologist himself is already a member? Does the so called 'insider' or 'native' anthropologist better fulfill the instruction to reveal a particular society from emic-perspective? Or does anthropologist, because of the identification with his/her research group and familiarity, loose some kind of sensibility due to the taken for-granted reality? And what are specifics of endo-ethnography in context of migration research? I'll try to answer these questions on a base of relevant literature and by incorporation personal narrative as endo-ethnographer into a wider discussion on this topic.