Formal education is an increasingly important route to upward socioeconomic mobility in economically developing settings and improving education levels is a key goal for improving human development around the world. Achieving such goals requires attention to the barriers to schooling but also the processes through which educational opportunities may increase and flourish. One factor associated with both economic development and children?s education is migration. Theoretically, migration is one mechanism through which developing regions may see additional investment and positive impacts on families and origin communities. The main goals of this project are to 1) describe differential school enrollment and attrition patterns by age and gender among children living in different familial migration contexts across settings, 2) evaluate how educational aspirations for children in migrant households differ from those compared to children in different familial migration contexts within the same communities, and 3) test competing hypotheses about the returns to migration and outcomes for children?s schooling over time. Throughout this project, we conceptualize familial migration context not as a simple dichotomy of migrant versus non-migrant; rather, we consider the timing of migration in the family life course, the type of migration undertaken and the continuity of ties between migrants and their households of origin. We also examine a variety of mechanisms through which the how familial migration context is linked to children's education, including factors such as expectations and aspirations at the child and parent level. A contribution of this project is a comparative approach that considers whether migration is similarly associated with education across contexts and the characteristics at the family and community levels.
| An, Danming; Eggum-Wilkens, Natalie D; Chae, Sophia et al. (2018) Adults' Conceptualisations of Children's Social Competence in Nepal and Malawi. Psychol Dev Soc J 30:81-104 |
| Glick, Jennifer E; Yabiku, Scott T (2016) Migrant children and migrants' children: Nativity differences in school enrollment in Mexico and the United States. Demogr Res 35:201-228 |
