How can we categorise ‘nationality’ and ‘second generation’ in surveys without (re)producing stigmatisation?

Author(s) : Milena Chimienti, Eduardo Guichard, Claudio Bolzman, Jean-Marie Le Goff

Source : https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-021-00237-1

“Whilst reflexive migration studies have criticised the use of categories such as ‘nationality’ and ‘second generation’ in quantitative research, several gaps on how to develop such reflexivity remain. In qualitative data, the co-construction of knowledge seems feasible during fieldwork, whereas the deductive process of quantitative research limits such interactions and is more at risk of reproducing a ‘state thought’. Through a longitudinal database, the LIVES-FORS cohort survey of the National Center of Competence in Research LIVES – Overcoming Vulnerability: Life Course Perspectives and FORS – the Swiss Centre of Expertise in Social Sciences (herafter LCS), we engage in this discussion and provide some answers. The LCS is an annual longitudinal survey that, in 2013, started following a cohort of young adults born between 1988 and 1997 who grew up in Switzerland. The underlying hypothesis of the LCS is that migrants’ descendants have access to different resources (and often a lack thereof) to Swiss natives. In this paper, we discuss both the theoretical and empirical challenges to using the categories ‘nationality’ and ‘second generation’. We show the fluidity and subjectivity of these categories. By changing the definition of the category ‘second generation’, we increased the proportion of ‘second-generation’ participants from 43 to almost 62% of the sample.”

 

Keywords: Nationality, Second generation, Knowledge production, Longitudinal data, Statistics, Methodological nationalism, Ethnicity-centred epistemologies, Reflexivities