Data, Methods and Comparisons

Abstract

This chapter introduces the Pathways to Success and ELITES projects and explains the decision to focus on children of migrants who have achieved steep social mobility compared to their parents, and the connection with the earlier TIES project, a quantitative comparison of the second generation in several European countries. The first part of the chapter analyses background data from the TIES study: comparative data on the educational and occupational trajectories of children of migrants from Turkey in Germany, France, the Netherlands and Sweden. These show that, even though the socio-economic backgrounds and migration histories of the first generation were similar in these four nations, the educational and occupational trajectories of their children were widely different, both in terms of the percentages of the second generation who attained ‘success’, and the specific ‘pathways’ used (e.g. through the education system or in the labour market). To give readers a clear conception of the type of problems the Pathways and ELITES projects first encountered, the chapter then continues with an explanation of the methods used by the various national research teams in the Pathways to Success consortium and the ELITES project to investigate the social mechanisms underlying these kinds of differences, found in diverse national – but also occupational – ‘integration contexts’. The sampling criteria used for the qualitative interviewees are described, and basic data is provided on who was interviewed by the various research teams. Without overlapping with methodological information given in individual chapters, the topics covered by all the teams’ interviews are listed. The final part of the chapter touches on some of the problems involved in making qualitative comparisons of ‘integration contexts’ (whether taking nations, cities or occupations as the units of comparison).