Laboratory

Migration and Mobility

At a Glance Projects Publications Team

Research Area

Integration and Segregation

Measuring and understanding patterns of migrant integration and segregation remain central challenges in contemporary demography, largely due to the multidimensional nature of these processes and the limitations of traditional data sources. This research area advances the field by leveraging digital trace data alongside primary data collection to substantially expand the empirical basis for studying integration and segregation. By doing so, it aims to generate more nuanced measures that capture how migrants become embedded in host societies.

A core strand of the research focuses on measuring migrant integration in online environments. While classical approaches have emphasized physical and socioeconomic domains, much of today’s social interaction unfolds in digital spaces and remains largely unaccounted for. Social media platforms and other online environments provide unprecedented opportunities to observe patterns of communication, social ties, and exchange. Building on these data, this research develops innovative indicators of integration based on online behavior, capturing how migrants interact with native populations, form communities, and navigate new social contexts. It also examines how online and offline integration processes intersect, thereby reinforcing or mitigating inequalities and shaping broader levels of social cohesion.

Another key contribution of the research lies in measuring and conceptualizing cultural distance between populations as it is manifested in digital environments. By analyzing online and social media activity data, this research constructs novel measures of cultural similarity across countries and groups. These measures provide new insights into how cultural proximity influences migration decisions and integration trajectories. Incorporating such measures into migration models, including gravity-type frameworks, can provide a more comprehensive understanding of migration flows. The findings suggest that cultural similarity is not only an outcome of migration, but is also a significant predictor of mobility, thereby enriching both theoretical and empirical models of population movement.

This research area also addresses the critical role of attitudes toward migrants, which shape both policy responses to and everyday experiences of integration. Using data from sources such as news media databases, as well as our own survey experiments, this work develops methods to track and analyze public sentiment toward migrants over time and across contexts. By linking these attitudinal measures to patterns of migrant presence and media salience, the research uncovers how discourse and perception interact with demographic realities. This approach enables a more fine-grained understanding of how anti-immigrant sentiments emerge, spread, and potentially influence integration outcomes.

Finally, this research area develops a rigorous methodological agenda for studying segregation processes. Conventional segregation indices, while widely used, often fail to capture the underlying dynamics they are intended to measure, particularly when changes in population composition confound interpretations of segregation trends. Addressing these limitations, the research systematically evaluates the validity of existing measures through a combination of simulations, real-world empirical tests, and formal mathematical analysis.

Overall, this research area contributes to a more comprehensive and empirically grounded understanding of processes of integration and segregation in the digital age, with important implications for both scientific inquiry and policy development.

Projects of this Research Area