Analysing the Role of Social Visits on Migrants’ Social Capital: A Personal Network Approach

Abstract

There are concerns that migrants may be embedded in far-flung networks with support being less collective. The spatial dispersion of their relatives and friends would result in fragmented networks with lower solidarity and lower mutual trust than densely connected networks based on geographical proximity. This may be particularly true for migrants who rarely meet their relatives and friends face-to-face. Yet, it is unclear what role, if any, distant visits play in migrants' social capital. This article examines these issues using representative data from Switzerland and a combination of network and sequence analysis. Results show that migrants have more spatially dispersed networks, which, in turn, are associated with higher number of emotional support ties compared to respondents with spatially close networks, yet they are characterised by low cohesion and low trust. Distant visits only partly moderate the influence of spatial dispersion on social capital. People who frequently visit or host their far-flung relatives and friends have more transitive networks and fewer supportive ties than those who see them less often, but they do not have higher trust in them. Overall, distant visits have relatively little impact on social capital, suggesting a network effect that goes beyond dyadic relationships.

Social Networks and Transnational Social Fields: A Review of Quantitative and Mixed-Methods Approaches

“…Subsequently, respondents report about each alter’s attributes, including location. Location is commonly measured using categorical variables (e.g., name of place and country; Dahinden 2005), but measures of network spatial dispersion can also be calculated with geolocation techniques (Molina, Petermann, and Herz 2015; Viry et al 2017). Additional questions about each alter’s attributes, characteristics of each ego-alter relationship, and whether each alter knows each other alter are also able to quantify different aspects of transnationality, such as frequency of communication with transnational alters (e.g., Dahinden 2005).…”

“…Studies focusing on individuals that adopt the personal networks approaches vary in the definition of the population and the name generators they use. With regard to the population, such studies usually concentrate on immigrants from a selected origin country residing in a selected destination (see Table 1), although some focus on return migrants (Fazito and Soares 2015) or include “natives” of the destination country (Dahinden 2009; Viry et al 2017; Andersson, Edling, and Rydgren 2018). Some investigate specific migrant flows from a single origin to a single destination (e.g., Lubbers et al 2010; Herz 2015; Bojarczuk and Mühlau 2018; Hosnedlová 2017), while others compare multiple flows to or from the same country (e.g., Bilecen and Sienkiewicz 2015; Cachia and Maya Jariego 2018; Kornienko et al 2018; Vacca et al 2018).…”

“…With regard to the name generators used (see Table 1), some studies enquire about people with whom the respondent has contact (e.g., Wimmer 2004; Lubbers et al 2010) or is friends (e.g., Bilecen and Faist 2015), others about specific supportive exchanges (e.g., Dahinden 2005; Cachia and Maya Jariego 2018). Name generators that elicit individuals’ most intimate or supportive relationships (Herz 2015; Viry et al 2017; Kornienko et al 2018) are valuable for understanding the core network’s transnational dimensions but may misrepresent levels of network transnationality in broader circles, which typically also contain weaker ties and vertical power relationships. Several approaches have been used to get at a broader range of relationships that extend beyond the core network.…”

Families from a network perspective

“…(b) In the conceptualisation of networks as outcomes, studies often look at how network characteristics vary across social categories and family forms (widowers, stepfamilies, etc.). The body of research that examines how personal and family networks change in response to major family life events falls into this realm (e.g., Antonucci et al 2011;Bidart and Lavenu 2005;Kalmijn 2003;Voorpostel 2013), like research that studies how migrants and spatially mobile individuals sustain transnational and multilocal families (Hein et al 2019;Herz 2015;Lubbers et al 2010;Molina et al 2015;Ryan 2011;Viry 2012;Viry et al 2017).…”

The Importance of Transport for Social Inclusion

“…Viry, Ganjour, Gauthier, Ravalet and Widmer (2017) assess associations between social visits and migrants' social capital, from a Swiss data set, with migrants defined by distance between birthplace and place of residence (i.e., not necessarily inter-country migration). Implicit in the analysis is that a higher level of social capital will mean a higher chance of social inclusion.…”