International Displacement and Family Stress in Latin America.

Family stress theories posit that individual family members are positioned to adapt to external stressors differently and that these differences can strain family systems. Analyzing in-depth interviews with a diverse sample of migrant mothers in Costa Rica, we investigate how families adjust to the stressors of international displacement. Three stages of family stress adjustment emerged from our analysis: (1) parents' prioritization of safety, (2) parents' and children's grappling with new legal, economic, and social circumstances, and (3) parents' protracted uncertainty in one or more of these realms concomitant with children's feeling resettled. A fourth stage of (4) convergent parent and child resettling also emerged, but only among select families who enjoyed stable financial or emotional support from extended kin or local institutions in Costa Rica. Parents' perceptions of their security, and social, economic, and legal circumstances contributed to the progression between stages of stress adjustment.

Costa Rica as a Destination for Migrants in Need of International Protection: IMR Country Report.

In this IMR Country Report, we draw attention to Costa Rica as a strategic location for expanding research and theory on migrants in need of protection (MNP), who have migrated abroad primarily to evade an imminent threat to their survival. MNP constitute an increasing share of all international migrants in Costa Rica and worldwide, yet research on these migrants and their migration dynamics remains comparatively underdeveloped relative to research on migrants who relocate abroad primarily in pursuit of material gains, social status, or family reunification. As we highlight, Costa Rica is an instrumental site to deepen understandings of MNP populations and migration dynamics because its large and rapidly growing MNP population is incredibly diverse with respect to national origins, demographic characteristics, and underlying motivations for migration. This diversity presents ample opportunities to better understand heterogeneity in the different types of threats MNP seek to evade; how and why MNP incorporation is shaped by individuals' demographic attributes and pre-migration threats; and how the social networks of various MNP subpopulations develop and overlap with time. Moreover, the geographic concentration of MNP in two regions in Costa Rica lends itself to primary data collection among this population and generates opportunities for estimating local MNPs' demographic characterization, even in the absence of a reliable sampling frame.

Developmental Idealism and Migration: Theorizing their Relationship and an Empirical Example from Nepal.

This paper brings together both theoretically and empirically two strands of social science research: migration and developmental idealism. The paper is motivated by the fact that there are extensive bodies of research about migration and about developmental idealism, but almost no discussion in the literature about how they might be interconnected. We present theoretical arguments concerning the influence of migration in distributing developmental idealism around the world and in developmental idealism being a force influencing the migration decisions of people. We also provide an empirical investigation of how variation in developmental idealism may have been an influence on migration and choice of migration destinations in Nepal. Thus, we extend the developmental idealism literature to include migration and the migration literature to include developmental idealism.

Family Obligation Attitudes, Gender, and Migration.

This study focuses on attitudes related to fulfilling family obligations and their relationships to migration behavior. We hypothesize that men who highly value fulfilling family obligations will be more likely to migrate in order to fulfill material obligations while women who highly value fulfilling family obligations will be less likely to migrate in order to fulfill care obligations. The empirical analysis examines data from the Chitwan Valley Family Study, located in south-central Nepal. We test whether variation in how much individuals value putting family needs before individual needs and caring for their adult parents matter for whether they migrate at all and if so, to which specific destinations. Our results provide only moderate support for these hypotheses but uncover patterns in how these attitudes toward family obligations are related to migration destinations. Men with strong attitudes toward family obligations are more likely to migrate internationally but especially to nearby India, sacrificing some level of economic returns for proximity. For women, the effect of attitudes is consistent: putting family needs first is negatively related to migration, while caring for adult parents is positively related to migration to India but not domestic or other international destinations. The findings suggest that our conventional typology of gendered labor and gender expectations for masculine breadwinning and feminine care might too strictly dichotomize the reality of how people actually care and provide for their families, obfuscating how they negotiate these competing demands.

Fatalistic Beliefs and Migration Behaviors: A Study of Ideational Demography in Nepal.

We investigate influences of fatalistic beliefs on domestic and international migration in Nepal, positing that fatalistic beliefs may affect decisions to migrate and where to locate. Fatalism is the belief that human outcomes are preordained by forces outside of one's power and control. Because of its relationship with effort and innovation, fatalism may be an important factor in people's decision to migrate and destination choice. We expect that fatalistic beliefs encourage or discourage migration depending upon societal expectations to migrate and the relative ease of migration to different destinations. Our empirical analysis relies on migration histories of respondents from the Chitwan Valley Family Study. Results from multinomial logistic regression models provide evidence that fatalistic beliefs increase overall migration propensity and has both positive and negative destination-specific effects. Fatalistic beliefs increase Nepalis' odds of migrating to destinations that are, relatively speaking, easier to access, but decrease the odds of migrating to destinations with higher barriers to entry.

The Mental Map of National Hierarchy in Europe.

We theorize that people's perceptions of national hierarchy are aligned not only with longstanding cultural schemas of development but also with schemas of cultural wealth. We use data from the Nation Brands Index surveys to examine how European publics' evaluate their own country and other European countries across many attributes. We find that European publics rank northwest European countries highest on developmental attributes and southwestern European nations highest on cultural attributes, while they rank eastern European countries lowest in both categorizations. Moreover, we show that publics' rankings of countries load to two related yet distinct factors, the contents of which closely reflect schemas of development and cultural wealth. This evidence suggests that these two distinct schemas are simultaneously present in Europeans' perceptions of national hierarchy.

Ethno-Caste Influences on Migration Rates and Destinations.

While studies commonly show differences in out-migration between ethnic groups, ethnicity most often features no more than a side note in the emigration literature, and we have very little insight about why people from different ethnic groups migrate at different rates. Understanding ethnic differences in migration rates and destination choice has important implications for the present-day and future potential for either dampening or exacerbating ethnic discrimination and opportunity structures. Building on existing migration theory, we identify three possible mechanisms through which ethnicity might influence out-migration rates and destination choice: human and economic capital, contemporary discrimination, and historical legacies that are perpetuated through social networks. Our empirical investigation uses longitudinal panel survey data from Nepal and we find that all three of these mechanisms likely influence out-migration and destinations of the five major ethno-caste groups. However, we show that historical legacy and human and economic capital emerge as the key drivers of ethnic differences in out-migration here. We discuss what these results mean for migration studies as well as the potential for the institution of migration to affect patterns of ethno-caste-based disadvantage in Nepal. The theoretical basis and empirical evidence from our study also suggest ways to understand the reasoning for and consequence of ethnic and racial differentials in migration patterns in other areas of the world.

When does Social Capital Matter for Migration? A Study of Networks, Brokers, and Migrants in Nepal.

The study of social capital has been one of the strongest areas of recent advance in migration research, but there are still many questions about how it works and why it has varying effects in studies of different places. In this article, we address the contextual variation in social capital's effects on migration by considering migration brokers. We argue that destinations for which migration is logistically difficult to arrange give rise to brokerage industries and hypothesize that brokers in turn substitute for the informational capital typically provided by social networks. Our empirical tests in Nepal support this narrative, showing that social networks matter for migration to destinations where brokers are not available and have little discernible effect on migration to brokered destinations. Our results suggest that migration research should consider the growing role of brokerage agencies, that theorizations of social capital more broadly must contend with how it is delimited by brokers, and that social scientists might also consider other consequences that can arise from these migration brokers that are increasingly common in many countries and provide a marketized replacement for social capital in some cases.

Influences of Material Aspirations on Migration.

In this article, we investigate the influences of material aspirations on migration in Nepal, positing that material aspirations may have important influences on decisions to migrate and where to locate. We discuss a theoretical model explaining how these aspirations might be key influences in the migration decision. Using detailed continuous migration histories from the 2008-2012 Chitwan Valley Family Study, we estimate logistic and alternative-specific conditional logit models to examine how material aspirations in Nepal influence migration rates and destinations. Our empirical analyses provide strong evidence that material aspirations have large effects on overall rates of migration and affect destination-specific migration rates, particularly for relatively wealthy Western and Asian destinations. We also show an interaction effect between material aspirations and destination-specific expected earnings in influencing people's migration choices. It is the people with high aspirations who migrate to destinations with high earning potentials.

Cultural antecedents to community: An evaluation of community experience in the United States, Thailand, and Vietnam.

To what extent does community experience differ between low context and high context societies? Prior literature theorizes that community experience consists of two separate, yet highly related concepts: community attachment, an individual's general rootedness to a place, and community satisfaction, how well an individual's community meets their societal needs. We test this conceptualization of community experience across communities in the US and two Southeast Asian nations: Thailand and Vietnam. We argue that Southeast Asian nations constitute "high context" societies with relatively high social integration and solidarity while the US is more individualized and less socially integrated and thus constitutes a "low context" society. Our results provide empirical evidence that individuals' experience of community varies between low and high context societies. These results demonstrate that cultural context continues to matter in regards to the lived experience of community and researchers need to remain vigilant in accounting for such differences as they seek to examine the concept of community more broadly.

Developmental Idealism: The Cultural Foundations of World Development Programs.

This paper extends theory and research concerning cultural models of development beyond family and demographic matters to a broad range of additional factors, including government, education, human rights, daily social conventions, and religion. Developmental idealism is a cultural model-a set of beliefs and values-that identifies the appropriate goals of development and the ends for achieving these goals. It includes beliefs about positive cause and effect relationships among such factors as economic growth, educational achievement, health, and political governance, as well as strong values regarding many attributes, including economic growth, education, small families, gender equality, and democratic governance. This cultural model has spread from its origins among the elites of northwest Europe to elites and ordinary people throughout the world. Developmental idealism has become so entrenched in local, national, and global social institutions that it has now achieved a taken-for-granted status among many national elites, academics, development practitioners, and ordinary people around the world. We argue that developmental idealism culture has been a fundamental force behind many cultural clashes within and between societies, and continues to be an important cause of much global social change. We suggest that developmental idealism should be included as a causal factor in theories of human behavior and social change.