Social Interactions, Resilience, and Access to Economic Opportunity: A Research Agenda for the Field of Computational Social Science

Abstract

We argue that the increasing availability of digital trace data presents substantial opportunities for researchers and policy makers to better understand the importance of social networks and social interactions in fostering economic opportunity and resilience. We review recent research efforts that have studied these questions using data from a wide range of sources, including online social networking platform such as Facebook, call detail record data, and network data from payment systems. We also describe opportunities for expanding these research agendas by using other digital trace data, and discuss various promising paths to increase researcher access to the required data, which is often collected and owned by private corporations.

Mass migration governance and openness toward refugees: Comparing Germany and Turkey

“…Integration courses in Germany include German language instruction and modules on the country's history, laws, and cultural norms. Studies identified integration courses as successful after assessing that Syrians in locations with more completed integration courses are, on average, better integrated (Kuchler & Stroebel, 2023). Despite some criticism, i.e., lack of adequate assessment of the educational competencies and needs of refugees, Germany is a country that provides adequate opportunities for refugees to integrate into the country's regular school system by meeting the German language requirement.…”