Laboratory

Migration and Mobility

At a Glance Projects Publications Team

Project

Measuring and Modeling Cultural Distance Between Countries and its Relationship with Migration Patterns

Carolina Coimbra Vieira, Sophie Lohmann, Emilio Zagheni; in Collaboration with Fabrício Benevenuto, Pedro Olmo Stancioli Vaz de Melo (both: Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil), Filipe Nunes Ribeiro (Federal University of Ouro Preto, Minas Gerais, Brazil)

Detailed Description

Culture is an important determinant of migration aspirations and flows. However, measuring cultural distance has proven to be difficult, especially on a global scale. The availability of digital trace data and textual data offers new opportunities to map cultural distance between populations.

The main goals of this project are: (i) to measure distance between countries in terms of cultural attributes, (ii) to evaluate the extent to which cultural distance explains migration aspirations and flows, and (iii) to assess the impact of migration on cultural attributes of the host population. Achieving these goals requires new data and methodological innovation, in particular in the context of developing metrics of cultural distance.

In a first paper, focusing mainly on developing methods, we used data from the Facebook advertising platform to evaluate and compare, in a statistical sense, the volume of interest in Brazilian cuisine around the world. Our results have revealed that similarities in culinary taste are often both a consequence and a predictive factor of migration flows.

Next, we refined the methods and tools for this project and scaled the data collection to expand the geographic scope of the analysis beyond Brazil. While still focusing on food and drink as markers of a country’s culture, we measured the similarity between a set of 16 countries across the globe. We assessed the association between migration and cultural similarity between countries by comparing our measure of cultural similarity with international migration data. Our results have shown, among other findings, that larger immigrant populations are associated with more similar food and drink preferences between their country of origin and their country of destination.

A third study has illustrated the impact of adding these measures of cultural similarity (based on food and drink preferences) to gravity models used to predict migration. Our results indicate that the new measures of similarity in food and drink preferences derived from Facebook data improve the prediction power of traditional gravity models and have a predictive capacity comparable to that of classic variables used in the literature, such as shared language and history, and thus open up new opportunities to better understand the determinants of migration and to improve migration predictions.

Building on these pioneering studies using Facebook data, we aim to expand the scope of this project by analyzing a range of textual data, including newspapers, parliamentary debates, and audiovisual transcripts (e.g., YouTube or television). Using recent advances in natural language processing and large language models (LLMs), the project aims to embed large multilingual text corpora and derive measures of cultural similarity based on semantic and topical content.

This broader framework enables several new research directions. First, it allows for more comprehensive and flexible measurement of cultural similarity across countries and topics. Second, it enables the study of how cultural similarity relates to migration flows and migration aspirations. Third, by leveraging longitudinal text data, it can be used to examine how migration shapes cultural dynamics over time, including how public discourse, norms, and topic salience evolve in response to migration.

A Measure of Cultural Similarity Across Countries Based on Facebook Users’ Interests in Food and Drinks

The plot shows our estimates of the asymmetric measure of cultural similarity between countries, based on Facebook users’ interests in food and drinks. Each cell corresponds to the index of similarity between the country in the row and the country in the column in terms of the number of Facebook users interested in each one of the top 50 foods and drinks preferred by the Facebook users living in the country in the row. © MPIDR; Source: COIMBRA VIEIRA, C.; LOHMANN, S.; ZAGHENI, E.; VAZ DE MELO, P. O. S.; BENEVENUTO, F.; RIBEIRO, F. N.: The interplay of migration and cultural similarity between countries: evidence from Facebook data on food and drink interests. PLoS One 17:2, e0262947-e0262947 (2022). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0262947

Publications

Coimbra Vieira, C.; Lohmann, S.; Zagheni, E.:

The value of cultural similarity for predicting migration: evidence from food and drink interests in digital trace data

Population and Development Review 50:1, 149–176. (2024)    

Coimbra Vieira, C.; Lohmann, S.; Zagheni, E.; Vaz de Melo, P. O. S.; Benevenuto, F.; Ribeiro, F. N.:

The interplay of migration and cultural similarity between countries: evidence from Facebook data on food and drink interests

PLOS One 17:2, e0262947–e0262947. (2022)    

Coimbra Vieira, C.; Ribeiro, F. N.; Vaz de Melo, P. O. S.; Benevenuto, F.; Zagheni, E.:

Using Facebook data to measure cultural distance between countries: the case of Brazilian cuisine

In: WWW '20: proceedings of the Web Conference 2020; Apr 20-25, 2020, Taipei, Taiwan, 3091–3097. New York, NY: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). (2020)