Qualitative Methods in Migration Research

Abstract

The unprecedented demographic transformations due to global human mobility and its multifaceted social, political, and economic consequences in both countries of reception and origin, have motivated an increase of interest in having reliable information and deeper knowledge about migratory patterns and the subsequent accommodation of diversity issues both by policymakers and scholars. This is especially true considering that there is a general consensus that this phenomenon is a long-term trend of our more recent history, and it is featured by being complex and unpredictable while giving rise to a permanent atmosphere of uncertainty. We need methodological tools for increasing the understanding of our basic questions on why people move, why they move to certain countries rather than others, what we can do about forced migrants’ vulnerable situations, and how we can link cohesion and diversity, human rights, and security, and a long list of issues and frameworks that shape migration studies today. To have a universal toolkit for producing knowledge is almost a naive request. What we have learned after several decades of research is that migration research needs to be sited and contextualised (King, 2018), and always placed within a given process (Zapata-Barrero, 2018). Most migration-related problems have to do with how people perceive them and behave accordingly, rather than having objective value-free understandings. In other words, migration research is mostly about interpretations rather than facts. Hence, there is an importance to digging into a methodological technique that has a particular role in producing knowledge by analysing how people, institutions, and governments interpret human mobility and diversity dynamics.