Sarah Hayford, Professor of Sociology and Director of Graduate Studies
Please tell us about the main research question you are trying to answer.
We want to know how children are affected when someone in their family migrates away from the household. There are lots of different ways in which migration may affect children. Some of the effects are probably good for children, overall, and some may be bad for children. For example, the household may have more money to spend on children’s school or health care, but children may be lonely when a parent migrates. Migration of a family member may also change the way children think about their own future migration. These impacts are probably different depending on things like how old the child is or the relationship between the child and the migrant (e.g., a parent vs. a sibling). We also expect that they are different in different countries — for instance, having more money to spend on schooling may be less important if there is not a school nearby.
Can you share a bit about your methods?
Our main method is to collect data through a household survey. We work with local researchers and interviewers in each country to interview children and the adult who takes care of them in households with migrants and households without migrants. Because we want to compare our results across countries, we worked to make the survey questions as similar as possible across the three countries while still respecting the unique context in place. To develop the survey questions, we first started with one-on-one interviews with parents in each country. We then conducted focus groups with parents, teachers, social workers and other people who spend time with children in order to understand how children are raised and what is expected of children in each place.
Why did you select the particular countries in which you work? Are you seeing differences across countries?
We selected Mexico, Mozambique and Nepal as our study countries partly because team members had existing projects in these countries and had worked previously with researchers in those countries. We relied on these collaborators and previous knowledge in order to design the surveys. We also chose these countries because they all have high levels of migration, but they have different social and family systems, so we could understand how migration affects children differently across these settings.
We are seeing lots of differences across countries! It’s easier to describe what is not different than to list all the differences. One similarity across the three countries is that children have very high aspirations for how much education they want to get, and parents share these goals. In all three countries, most children say that getting a good education is very important to them, and most children want at least a college degree.
Although all three countries have high levels of migration, children’s goals and plans vary across the three sites. In all three countries, a lot of adolescents want to work abroad before they get married — about half of them in Mozambique, and about two-thirds of them in Mexico and Nepal. In Mexico, nearly three-fourths of adolescents want to move permanently away from the communities they grew up in. In Mozambique and Nepal, this is much less common — only about a third of them want to live outside their communities of origin.
What are the main findings from your study to date? What are the broader impacts of the research? Put another way, do you have policy recommendations or related recommendations?
One of our key findings is that the effects of migration on children are very different across these three countries. Any policy recommendation has to take these differences into account — there’s no single solution to better support children.
Is there anything else you'd like to add/highlight?
Our original plan was to interview the same children and caregivers twice, two years apart. We were able to carry out this plan in Mozambique, but our data collection for Mexico and Nepal was planned for spring 2020, so we had to postpone interviewing during the pandemic. We are hoping that the communities we work in and the families we are studying are not too badly affected by the disease.
