Project description
Partnership formation in the context of refugee migration
Between 2015 and 2016, Germany received large numbers of young unmarried male refugees, who arrived from culturally distant countries and settled in areas with largely non-existent co-ethnic communities. With the situation likely to complicate the process of refugees forming relationships, the EU-funded PARFORM project aims to conduct research that will provide illuminating answers. To that end, it will collect novel three-wave panel data on male refugee migrants from Syria and Afghanistan and administer specially-tailored instruments to established representative panel studies (e.g. CILS4EU-DE) to collect data on the German population. The project's findings will have significant policy implications for the social integration of refugees in Germany and Europe as a whole.
Objective
In 2015-16 Germany received large numbers of young unmarried male refugees arriving from culturally distant countries and settling in largely non-existent co-ethnic communities. This situation is likely to complicate the process of refugees’ partnership formation. Against this background the project seeks to answer three research questions:
1. To what extent is the partnership formation of newly arrived refugees in Germany determined by the demographic situation, and how does the process compare to patterns observed among the established German population (both majority and minority ethnic groups)?
2. How do social media and online dating affect partnership formation among recent refugee immigrants?
3. How do established members of German society react to refugees’ mating attempts, and how is this reflected in immigrants’ partnership patterns?
Whereas the first research question is largely descriptive, the others seek to advance the field’s theoretical and analytic frameworks by extending our understanding of opportunity structures in the age of the internet and social media, and conceptualizing partnership formation as a genuinely two-sided interactive process.
PARFORM will (1) collect novel three-wave panel data on male refugee migrants from Syria and Afghanistan and (2) administer specially tailored instruments to two established representative panel studies (GESIS panel and CILS4EU-DE) to collect data on the established German population. Multi-actor, multi-time and multi-level data will be analysed using advanced methods of network, panel and hierarchical data analyses.
Through a combination of theoretical innovations, methodological rigour and analytic depth, PARFORM will contribute to scholarly debates on immigrants’ partnership formation in the multidisciplinary fields of the sociology of migration, demography and network studies. Its findings will have policy implications for the social integration of refugees in Germany and Europe as a whole.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
ERC-COG - Consolidator GrantHost institution
68161 Mannheim
Germany