Research agenda – work packages

The data will be collected at the three university locations Duisburg, Bochum and Dortmund. Due to its fascinating history of migration and a broad spectrum of migrants and their organizations, the Ruhr area represents an ideal research environment for our work.

To address our research question on the role of migrant organizations in the context of changing welfare states and transnationalizing social protection strategies, we are working in close cooperation with three interlinked work packages. They allow us to trace the coproduction of social protection at the level of (local) governance structures, at the level of migrant organizations and at the level of individual protection practices, while examining the interaction between these layers.

Work package I: (Local) governance structures

Associated with a transforming welfare state and the pluralization of welfare landscapes, policy and administration are increasingly addressing migrant organizations as partners as well as contractors for social services. It is expected that migration-related experience, resources and knowledge will facilitate access to the often convoluted social protection systems of the Federal Republic of Germany. Against this background the first work package focuses on how migrant organizations are incorporated into political structures as well as into the local and municipal welfare landscape.

The work package is designed and coordinated by the team at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Following a document analysis, the first step will be to examine how migrant organizations are embedded in support programs, integration concepts or municipal mission statements.

Semi-structured expert interviews in municipal integration centres, youth welfare offices, umbrella organizations or with other professionals, representatives of state support programs or state coordination offices are a central data source to empirically work on and provide answers to our research questions. Given that the epistemic interest in the work package is directed at knowledge about structures and procedures in the context of institutional-organizational conditions of action, the analysis is based on the following steps: paraphrasing, coding, and thematic comparison (based on Meuser/Nagel 2005).

Work package II: Migrant organizations and their networks

The second work package focuses on migrant organizations and their networks. The team of the Ruhr-University Bochum explores organizations with regard to their structure, their self-image and their goals in terms of their practices relevant to social protection. In addition, cooperative network structures between migrant organizations, state institutions and other welfare providers are examined.

The data is collected through semi-structured expert interviews with representatives of the selected organizations. Complementary to the other work packages, 6 migrant organizations will be interviewed in each city. To conclude, the networks and connections generated will be analysed with the help of selected structural parameters and visualization by the network tool Vennmaker to illustrate social ego-centred networks of relationships.

Work package III: Individual and family social protection strategies

The third work package examines how migrants organize their social protection individually and at family level against the background of their biographical experiences, resources and patterns of interpretation. In this regard, the focus will be on the relationship between immigrants and migrant organizations. This part of the project is carried out, coordinated and managed by the team at the TU Dortmund University. The data collected includes guideline-based interviews with biographical components, ego-centred networks and participatory observations.

In order to better understand individual biographies, the focus will also be placed on a discussion of contexts and attributions of meaning. The analysis is carried out using hermeneutical procedures based on sociological assumptions of knowledge, according to which social knowledge guides the practices of the actors. The approach follows two steps: coding and sequence analysis.

The interviews will be complemented by participatory observations in various settings. This provides an insight into the logic of the practice in addition to the participant’ linguistic reflections. Furthermore, the ego-centred networks will be collected and evaluated with the network tool Vennmaker, which links the network characteristics of the participants to their biographical data.