Linking Meaning Structures to Attitudes on Immigration

• In Event: 078 - Section on Sociology of Culture Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 17. Nations, Collective Memories, and Immigration

Abstract

The current migratory crisis facing Europe throws up fault lines between countries as well as within their populations. While even previously liberal EU country governments start closing their borders to asylum seekers, citizens' attitudes about immigration slowly tilt negative no small part due to public discourse. With sociologists only recently increasing their attention to this topic, one central aspect of this development the meaning structures that inform how people think about immigration and immigrants remains poorly understood. This lacking knowledge about people's implicit sense-making of immigration complicates the explanation of the currently emerging fault lines and exposes the data gathering process to bias by focussing on only one aspect of understanding immigration. The research project at hand aims to address this gap in the sociological literature on immigration attitudes. To do so, it applies a mixed-method approach which makes use of newly available data analyzed with conventional hierarchical linear models and a computational social science component that undergirds these analyses with data gathered from social networking sites. The first component is based on the recently published Transatlantic Trends Survey 2014. The second component draws on the sociological literature concerned with the formal analysis of meaning structures and uses topic modeling to analyze data on facebook groups with explicit pro- or anti-immigration agendas.

Author

• Friedolin Merhout, Duke University