Research project Migrant Trajectories

During the past thirty years there has been a remarkable increase in immigration to Sweden. Many assume that this will have major impacts on Swedish society during the next decades. Much of the development will depend on the process of integration of immigrants, that is, on the extent to which immigrants will become part of the Swedish society on equal terms. Our research program focuses on investigating these processes in essential areas of life: geographical residence and housing, family formation, labour market participation, educational careers, and social security. We take a longitudinal view on migration and study the patterns and processes from a life-course perspective. We concentrate on migrants who arrived in Sweden during the past twenty to thirty years and follow their life trajectories from their arrival in Sweden to the present.

Contrary to most previous research, we regard integration as a cross-cutting multi-dimensional process in which developments in one life domain influence developments in others, and in which environmental changes affect life-course processes and their interlinkages. The core of our research is thus devoted to analyzing the interrelationships between the processes in different life domains and to assess the patterns and outcomes for different migrant groups, including refugees and children of immigrants. Our studies make use of Swedish register data which cover the entire resident population of Sweden. They provide a unique source of data to study life trajectories across different life domains and from different perspectives. State-of-the-art as well as recently developed methods particularly suited to study trajectories and patterns across different life domains are applied. Our research approach of investigating migration processes from a situated and linked life perspective goes beyond current standard approaches and is likely to produce more profound knowledge about the processes of migrants’ integration.