Xarxes personals, associacionisme i integració social de la població immigrada: una aproximació des dels mètodes mixtos

Abstract

The overarching research objective of this thesis is to study the social integration process of the Ecuadorean and Moroccan migrant population in Catalonia. It focuses specifically on the role of associative participation in this process, analysing it from a relational standpoint. The research is based on the premise that personal networks’ change and the direction of said change shows migrants’ “structural fitting in” in the host society. Therefore, migrants’ networks reveal the social integration patterns from the relational point of view. The thesis has focussed on identifying the explanatory factors behind the development of migrants’ personal networks, considering it as a product of both the situation at the time of arrival (the initial context) and the specific trajectories of this population in Catalonia. The thesis pays particular attention to the contribution of the associative sphere to this process. The associative sphere is studied from a dual standpoint: how networks contribute to defining migrants’ participation, and, in turn, how participation affects social integration patterns. In addition to the former theoretical or substantive contributions, the methodological issues of the research study also played a key role in the dissertation. This research study develops an in-depth theoretical and applied methodological reflection on the use of the mixed methods methodology in the field of social network analysis. The thesis has reviewed its uses, potential and limitations in order to focus particularly on two key issues in the current developments of relational sociology: the link between factual and cognitive components of the social reality, and the role of social networks at different levels of the social structure. The research study’s methodological design therefore combines a personal networks survey in line with extensive quantitative reasoning, with semi-structured biographical interviews that follow the intensive and interpretative qualitative reasoning. These various methods pursue the same objectives and research questions. They are combined according to an explanatory sequential and nested design, such that the combination and interpretative integration of both empirical parts allows the specific objectives tackled by the research to be achieved.

Date of Award	11 Apr 2014
Original language	Catalan
Supervisor	Carlos Lozares Colina (Director) & Joel Marti Olive (Director)