Young people are mobile across Europe and transnational mobility is seen as a differentiating factor enabling them to gain personal and professional experience. While relationships are seen as important for mobility, the relevance of personal networks to young people´s thoughts of moving abroad has not received adequate attention. Specifically, different types of relationships with (non-)mobile others to whom young people are connected have not yet been studied as one origin of their thoughts of moving abroad. Grounded in quantitative data from the European H2020 project MOVE (n=5,499) we show that in addition to different aspects of unequal mobility opportunities (young people’s and parents’ socio-demographic status, prior mobility experience, country of residence, occupation) the constitution of young people’s network has a bearing on their mobility prospects. Our results show that young people´s thoughts of moving abroad differ between European countries, decrease with age, increase among students, and increase when respondents and significant others in their networks (parents, partners, friends, other relatives) have prior experience of mobility.

This paper reveals the potential which lies in combining the qualitative analysis of egocentric network maps with the corresponding narratives collected simultaneously during an interview. It presents a method of analysis which has been validated in research on the lifeworlds of international students in order to elucidate their perspective on social support in their everyday lives. It is a method of analysis which can be applied in various other research fields and to answer various research questions when it comes to exploring meanings, feelings, relationships, attractions, and dependencies. The method is interviewee-centred and the approach is holistic, leading to comprehensive insights. Using examples of original research data, this paper first illustrates the data collection and then the data analysis procedure in the following three steps: analysis of the map, analysis of the narrative, and combination of the analyses.

Social network research on migration and mobility suffers from two drawbacks. On the one hand, network studies are often confined to specific types of relationships (e.g. to persons, to organizations) and do not see relationships of different types as part of the same structure. On the other hand, qualitative network approaches are only just beginning to address supradyadic structures. Presenting our study on transnational youth mobility, we show how qualitative network analysis allows researchers to study how mobility is dynamically interrelated to social network structures consisting of different types of relationships. Taking the example of youth mobility in Europe, we apply qualitative structural analysis (QSA) to analyse relationships not only with others but also between others. The article presents a qualitative network approach for migration and mobility research and shows how im/mobility is structured by relationships with and between various entities.

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