February
15

Hybrid Format

Origin and Destination Attachment: Study of Cultural Integration on Twitter

Jisu Kim
Laboratory of Digital and Computational Demography, February 15, 2023

Jisu Kim from the Laboratory of Digital and Computational Demography talks about cultural integration on Twitter.

Abstract

The cultural integration of immigrants conditions their overall socio-economic integration as well as natives’ attitudes towards globalisation in general and immigration in particular. At the same time, excessive integration—or assimilation—can be detrimental in that it implies forfeiting one’s ties to the origin country and eventually translates into a loss of diversity (from the viewpoint of host countries) and of global connections (from the viewpoint of both host and home countries). Cultural integration can be described using two dimensions: the preservation of links to the origin country and culture, which we call origin attachment, and the creation of new links together with the adoption of cultural traits from the new residence country, which we call destination attachment.

In this talk Jisu Kim introduces a means to quantify these two aspects based on Twitter data. She builds origin and destination attachment indices and analyse their possible determinants (e.g., language proximity, distance between countries), also in relation to Hofstede’s cultural dimension scores. The results stress the importance of language: a common language between origin and destination countries favours origin attachment, as does low proficiency in the host language. Common geographical borders seem to favour both origin and destination attachment. Regarding cultural dimensions, larger differences among origin and destination countries in terms of Individualism, Masculinity and Uncertainty appear to favour destination attachment and lower origin attachment.

About

Jisu holds a PhD in Data Science from Scuola Normale Superiore in Italy. She has been working on exploring and establishing novel methods to improve relevant statistics of international migration using social media data. Her research focuses on the intersection of migration sciences, economics of migration, complex social networks, statistical models and data-driven algorithms.

Register to Take Part

You would like to attend the Online Seminar Talk? You are very welcome. Please register by writing an e-mail to office-zagheni@demogr.mpg.de.

Online Seminar Talk, February, 15th from 11 a.m. to 12 p.m. (Rostock time)

The Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) in Rostock is one of the leading demographic research centers in the world. It's part of the Max Planck Society, the internationally renowned German research society.