Partnership formation in the context of recent refugee migration

ongoing

In 2015-16 Germany received large numbers of young unmarried male refugees arriving from culturally distant countries and settling in largely non-existent co-ethnic communities. This situation is likely to complicate the process of refugees’ partnership formation. Against this background the project seeks to answer three research questions: 1. To what extent is the partnership formation of newly arrived refugees in Germany determined by the demographic situation, and how does the process compare to patterns observed among the established German population (both majority and minority ethnic groups)? 2. How do social media and online dating affect partnership formation among recent refugee immigrants? 3. How do established members of German society react to refugees’ mating attempts, and how is this reflected in immigrants’ partnership patterns? Whereas the first research question is largely descriptive, the others seek to advance the field’s theoretical and analytic frameworks by extending our understanding of opportunity structures in the age of the internet and social media, and conceptualizing partnership formation as a genuinely two-sided interactive process. PARFORM will (1) collect novel three-wave panel data on male refugee migrants from Syria and Afghanistan and (2) administer specially tailored instruments to two established representative panel studies (GESIS panel and CILS4EU-DE) to collect data on the established German population. Multi-actor, multi-time and multi-level data will be analysed using advanced methods of network, panel and hierarchical data analyses. Through a combination of theoretical innovations, methodological rigour and analytic depth, PARFORM will contribute to scholarly debates on immigrants’ partnership formation in the multidisciplinary fields of the sociology of migration, demography and network studies. Its findings will have policy implications for the social integration of refugees in Germany and Europe as a whole.