Arbeitsbereich

Migration und Mobilität

Auf einen Blick Projekte Publikationen Team

Projekt

Das Zusammenspiel zwischen dem Diskurs in sozialen Medien und der Segregation von Flüchtlingen

Emilio Zagheni, Asli Ebru Sanlitürk; in Zusammenarbeit mit Neal Marquez (University of Washington, Seattle, Vereinigte Staaten), Toomet Ott Siim (University of Tartu, Estland), Weber Ingmar (Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Deutschland), Garimella Kiran (Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, Vereinigte Staaten)

Ausführliche Beschreibung

Previous studies assessing attitudes toward migrants and refugees are biased toward Western and other developed host countries, despite these countries hosting only a small share of the current global stock of refugees. In addition, the temporal infrequency of these studies does not allow researchers to assess how sociopolitical events involving refugees alter perceptions and attitudes toward them. This is especially important in the current and recent political landscape, characterized by increasing stocks of Syrian refugees in countries such as Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan. This led to rapid changes in policies and laws on the extended stays of these refugees: The success of these policies is often contingent on the level of acceptance by the native populations. Thus, it is paramount to accurately gauge changing attitudes toward refugees.

To date, the primary method of collecting data on attitudes toward migrants is to use traditional survey instruments. The amount of planning, financial investment, and construction of such surveys limits the types of theories that can be tested as to potential heterogeneities and changes in attitudes toward migrants. The expanded use of various microblogging platforms has created a forum for people to voice their opinions on various topics, and it has also become particularly common in politicized conversations, including perceptions of migrants.

The project leverages this new data source to understand better the relationship between the discourse on social media platforms among Turkish natives and how Syrian refugees interact with them. Initial findings have shown that during periods of strongly negative discourse in the social media, Syrian refugees tend to be more socially isolated from the rest of the Turkish population than in periods when the discourse is more neutral, as measured by intergroup communication in phone calls and texts evaluated from anonymized cellphone data made available by the Data for Refugees (D4R) Challenge.

Publikationen

Marquez, N.; Garimella, K.; Toomet, O.; Weber, I. G.; Zagheni, E.:

Segregation and sentiment: estimating refugee segregation and its effects using digital trace data

MPIDR Working Paper WP-2019-021. (2019)