Who Succeeds and Who Fails? A Multilevel Social Network Analysis Approach to Immigrants' Psychological and Sociocultural Adaption in Europe (ISONET)
Project management
Dr. Malte Jansen, Dr. Georg Lorenz
Student assistant
Cansu Çankayalı
Partner
ETH Zurich, Chair of Social Networks: Dr. Zsófia Boda
Funding period
July 01, 2017 – June 30, 2021
Funding agency
Volkswagen Stiftung
Project description
The research project ISONET is funded by the VolkswagenFoundation. Dr. Malte Jansen und Dr. Georg Lorenz lead the project in cooperation with Dr. Zsófia Boda (ETH Zürich; Chair of Social Networks) since July 2017.
ISONET addresses a highly relevant research topic: the economic, social, and cultural integration of immigrants (and their children) in European societies. Successful integration can be identified by high levels of psychological adaption (identification with the host society, general well-being) and sociocultural adaption (success in the education system and on the labor market). Since integration is an inherently social process, our project focuses on the social environment, investigating the role of social networks in adaption processes. Social networks are complex, interconnected, and dynamic systems. ISONET focuses on their smallest building blocks in the given context: social ties between immigrants and their peers in the education system and beyond.
Substantive theory has put much emphasis on effects of the social environment on individual outcomes, especially in school (e.g., effects of peer culture, peer support, social comparisons, or language spoken amongst peers). Unfortunately, most empirical studies still use rather rough-grained techniques and aggregated measures (such as mean socio-economic background or mean ratio of immigrant students in a class, school, or neighborhood) to attempt to capture these processes. However, hypotheses about micro-level mechanisms cannot be properly tested using macro-level variables. Moreover, this approach also ignores that real sources of social influence are those subjectively meaningful to the individuals, such as friends or opinion leaders. Thus, often due to a lack of computational power and availability of appropriate methods and software, the majority of the past literature has missed the opportunity to test micro-mechanisms proposed by prominent theories on adaption with more appropriate network methodology.
ISONET fills the gap between theories and empirical work: we utilize and extend state-of-the-art computational social network methods that allow the joint dynamic modeling of relationship structures and individual measurements of adaption from an actor-oriented perspective. These developments include simulation-based, computationally intensive methods (Stochastic Actor-Oriented Models) as well as methods based on high-resolution, time-stamped data (Dynamic Actor-Oriented Markov Models). We have two overarching aims: a substantive and a methodological one. Our substantive aim is to identify the role of social ties in the integration of immigrants in Europe. For this, we focus on the most important indicators of psychological and sociocultural adaption in the education system and at the labor market transition. We also take macro-level characteristics of the social environment into account by estimating contextual effects. To be able to answer all of our research questions, our methodological aim is to extend the scope of the existing models. We do this in collaboration with the main developers of the two methods mentioned above (see their support letters attached) and aim to extend their publicly available software packages.
Our analyses relies on several large-scale datasets of elementary, secondary school, and university students from several European countries. Beyond relying on information from surveys and achievement tests, we also analyze high-resolution data collected by mobile phones and socio-badges (RFID tags), as well as social media information of students. The proposed project will strongly contribute to our understanding of the psychological and sociocultural adaption of immigrants. From a policy perspective, our results are especially important since they will help scholars and policy makers studying successful integration of immigrants to identify risk factors of failure.