Being in Britain

Key findings

SCIP is a cross national study about the Causes and Consequences of Socio-Cultural Integration Processes (SCIP) among New Immigrants in Europe. The SCIP survey revealed some of the challenges as well as the possibilities for contacting and surveying new immigrants in different European countries and provided insights for future studies. These insights can be found both in the overall methods report, as well as in the research paper “Sampling recently arrived immigrants in the UK: exploring the effectiveness of Respondent Driven Sampling” (Frere-Smith, Luthra & Platt, 2014).

Description

The study is led by Claudia Diehl at the University of Konstanz, Germany and involves partners from the Goettingen University and Bamberg University in Germany, Radboud University Nijmegen and the Netherlands Institute of Social Research in the Netherlands, ISER at the University of Essex as well as the LSE in the UK, and Trinity College Dublin and the Economic and Social Research Institute in Ireland.

The goal of this project is to better understand the reasons for migration of newly arrived immigrants to Europe, the challenges facing them and how the experiences and how they adjust to their new homes in the few years following arrival. It covers immigrants arriving in four European countries, UK, Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands, and covers both migrants form within Europe and from outside Europe.

In the UK we look at Pakistani and Polish immigrants, while the focus in Germany is on Turkish and Polish immigrants. Ireland concentrates on Polish immigrants and the Netherlands covers a wider range of immigrant groups, both Turkish and Moroccan, Polish and Bulgarian immigrants, as well as some smaller origin-country groups.

The project covers a range of migration topics, including social networks, religious and ethnic identification, language acquisition, attitudes and opinions about the country of settlement and about the immigrant’s home country, and the experiences of new migrants at work and home.

The project was funded by the NORFACE (New Opportunities for Research Funding Agency Co-operation in Europe) migration programme.

The data

A survey was carried out with around 7,000 immigrants across the four target countries. Participants had arrived within just the previous 18 months when they were first interviewed and around half of them were followed up after a year and a half for a further interview.

The data covering both waves of the study are available from the data archive at GESIS from early 2016.

More information

Find out more about the SCIP project on the Goettingen University website, including the survey questionnaires