Transnational families: Cross‐country comparative perspectives

Abstract

This special issue aims to address the gap in transnational families studies by identifying if there are common patterns and effects of transnational family life across countries and regions, using cross-country comparative analyses. In this editorial introduction, we highlight the overarching themes emerging from seven papers, which employ new large-scale surveys specifically designed to collect information about transnational family life across different Latin American, African, and Southeast Asian countries and China. We discuss how these comparative studies offer new ways of understanding transnational families by focusing on their prevalence, composition, the experiences of their members, and how these change over time. We also highlight how differing and changing notions of care over space and a person's lifetime influence how transnational families are created, reproduced, maintained, and experienced. In general, the issue as a whole emphasises the need to take structural factors in both sending and receiving contexts into account when studying the form that transnational families take, how this changes over time, and the general and specific gendered effects they have on different members.

Engaged parenting, gender, and children's time use in transnational families: An assessment spanning three global regions

“…Conducting a comparative study across different contexts presents a number of challenges (Mazzucato & Dito, ). One critical challenge is operationalizing the conceptual domains across unique data sets to allow cross‐country comparison.…”

African transnational families: Cross‐country and gendered comparisons

“…Literature on gender and migration has shown that women and men have different social network characteristics leading to different propensities to migrate, may have different reasons for migrating, and face different conditions overseas (Constable, ; Curran & Rivero‐Fuentes, ; Eremenko & González‐Ferrer, ; Liu, Riosmena, & Creighton, ; Malmusi et al, ; Toma & Vause, ). Yet there has been no systematic comparison of transnational families and in particular of migrant mothers and fathers (Mazzucato & Dito, ). This literature review summarises findings from different studies investigating the characteristics of female and male migrants and studies on transnational families that took the sex of the migrant parent into account, to inform our analyses.…”

“…Only recently have studies focussed on fathers (Poeze & Mazzucato, ; Pribilsky, ; Waters, ), indicating that fathers also suffer from the separation from their children, albeit in different ways. Finally, these studies are small‐scale and thus focus on transnational parents only (Mazzucato & Dito, ). They therefore cannot compare their findings with nontransnational parents, in order to identify what may be particular to being in a transnational family versus more general characteristics of a population.…”

“…As most studies on transnational families are in‐depth ethnographic studies, they have focussed on one particular origin group in one particular host country. Consequently, there is almost no comparative cross‐country research on the structure of transnational families (Mazzucato & Dito, ). Doing a cross‐country comparison allows us to address this gap by investigating whether characteristics of transnational parents are similar for different origin countries and whether we find common patterns in their family trajectories.…”

Doing Family in “Times of Migration”: Care Temporalities and Gender Politics in Southeast Asia

“…The Temporalities of Migration and Family: Rhythms, Ruptures, and Reversals Mazzucato and Schans (2011) were among the first scholars to argue that "methodologically and theoretically, families are still predominantly conceived of as nuclear, living together, and bounded by the nation state. … Transnational families … have been treated as a temporary phenomenon, with family reunification in the host society the preferred outcome for all family members" (704; see also Mazzucato and Dito 2018). With the increasing ubiquity of the "permanently temporary" migrant in regimes of unflexible noncitizenship in Asia, attention to family morphologies that bear the marks of the seemingly transgressive forces of increased migrations and mobilities has become more urgent.…”