Patrones de cambio de las redes personales de inmigrantes en Cataluña.

Abstract

By analyzing two waves of personal networks of immigrants to Catalonia (Spain) with a period of 1.5-2 years in between, a general model of change resulting from migration is proposed and people explanations that account for the observed changes are coded.The analyzed communities are Argentineans (n=25), Dominicans (n=16), Moroccans (n=13), and persons from Senegal and Gambia (n=13). It turns out that getting a job and the participation in courses and team sport pushes for change that follows the proposed general model (evolution). In contrast, marrying a partner of the same origin, getting children, participating in an ethnic association, traveling to the country of origin, and being visited by kin and friends frequently leads to change in the opposite direction (involution). The use of meta-visualizations of personal networks facilitates the comparison of networks of the same individual at different time points, as well as the comparison of networks aggregated over different communities. This aggregation shows that each of the four communities exhibits different ways of adaptation and change.

Keywords

• dynamic network analysis – personal networks – migration – mixed methods – social network analysis – visualization