Polish Families in Scotland: Work and Care in the Decision to Stay Lucy Ramasawmy Research Proposal 2009

Migration Context Migration Context  EU Accession in 2004 – the A8 countries  Volume of migrants rose and is now falling  Characteristics of migrants are changing  Evidence of families settling  Reasons for coming: purely economic?  Reasons for return: recession?  The problem of deskilling

Research Questions  What factors influence families to stay?  What family lifestyle do couples want? - Dual-earner or traditional male-breadwinner model?  What are the family structures?  How do families’ situations and plans change over one year  How is integration important in the decision to stay?

Polish society  Conflicting influences:  Communism  Catholicism  the Global Market and the EU  Effects on attitudes to:  Family  Gender Equality

Migrating and Settling – reasons  Higher earnings and benefits  More security ‘People are not afraid to have children here. In Poland we would have depended on our parents all the time if we had had a child’. (respondent in Iglicka, 2007)  Greater freedom to choose lifestyle - Preference theory (Hakim)  Society and Lifestyle  More individualist  Less conservative, less sex-discrimination (?)  Migration as an adventure

Influential factors in Family Return Reasons to return:  Financial insecurity due to recession  Work unfulfilling or without a future  Lifestyle: - Family too far away: child-care and support -Other problems with life in Scotland: racism, the weather.. Reasons to stay:  Children settled in school: key stages, public exams  Social networks  Employment opportunities ?  Children: culture, education and identity

Research design  Qualitative interviews, with a few structured survey-style attitudinal questions for triangulation  Design inductive and exploratory as group is not yet well understood  30 families to be accessed, in Edinburgh and Glasgow  Men and women to be interviewed from different families to get unbiased view  Two interviews with each respondent with 12 month gap to explore change and allow for intermediate analysis  Analysis by mixed methods: narrative analysis and thematic coding, with answers to structured questions providing context

Outstanding Issues  Language problems, interpreters and costs  Survey-style questions in qualitative interviews – with discussion of rationales  Men and women or couples together and not interviewing children  Attrition – explain two interviews at outset, send progress report and Xmas card, /phone  Access – migrant parents are busy people, looking for an unbiased sample (several routes), personal contacts for trust