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 Filipe Nunes Ribeiro (Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto, Minas Gerais, Brazil), Pedro Olmo Stancioli Vaz de Melo, Fabrício Benevenuto (both: Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil)

The project develops methods to measure cultural distance across countries, using digital trace data from social media. These measures are then incorporated into gravity models of migration to improve predictions of migration flows and better understand their patterns.  Detailed Description

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

Research Keywords:

Culture, International Migration, Ethnic Minorities, Migration, Psychology

Region keywords:

Brazil, World

Publications

Coimbra Vieira, C.; Lohmann, S.; Zagheni, E.:
Population and Development Review, 1–28. (2024)    
Coimbra Vieira, C.; Lohmann, S.; Zagheni, E.; Vaz de Melo, P. O. S.; Benevenuto, F.; Ribeiro, F. N.:
PLOS One 17:2, e0262947–e0262947. (2022)    
Coimbra Vieira, C.; Ribeiro, F. N.; Vaz de Melo, P. O. S.; Benevenuto, F.; Zagheni, E.:
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)    
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.