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The Problems of Assessing Transnational Mobility: Identifying Latent Groups of Immigrants in Germany Using Factor Mixture Analysis

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Abstract

This paper explores immigrants’ transnational mobility in Germany. It uses data of the Socio-Economic Panel Study and four indicators regarding frequency, length, and total duration of visits to the country of origin. The study applies factor mixture analyses in order to investigate whether (a) the observed indicators refer to a uniform underlying construct of transnational mobility and (b) the relationship between the latent construct and the observed indicators establishes in a uniform manner for all respondents. The most reliable model distinguishes three latent classes of immigrants, thus indicating no uniform underlying construct of transnational mobility. Theoretically consistent findings could be derived for about 58 % of the 4019 respondents. However, the relation between the observed indicators and the latent variable diverges substantially for the remaining 42 %. Thus, the findings indicate that the commonly applied indicator of return visits largely fails to assess transnational mobility. Rather, different groups of immigrants engage very diversely in visits to the country of origin. The findings stimulate a variety of conceptual problems future theoretical and empirical research needs to tackle.

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Notes

  1. As has been shown so far, transnationalism covers a wide range of phenomena, e.g. social ties, mobility or identities. However, whenever the notations of transmigrants, transnational immigrants, and transnationals are used in the subsequent sections of this study, they solely refer to the restricted topic of transnational mobility.

  2. The countries of origin are: Greece, Italy, Spain, Turkey and former Yugoslavia.

  3. Usually the expected maximization (EM) algorithm for incomplete data is used (Dempster et al. 1977). Due to space limitations the underlying computation of the maximum-likelihood estimates cannot be discussed in detail.

  4. The term of item response theory usually applies to a case where the latent variable is continuous and the indicators are categorical (Collins and Lanza 2010: 6; Muthén and Asparouhov 2006: 1053).

  5. The corresponding values as well as each class’ mean remittances and age are shown in Table 4. As no imputations were performed, the diverging numbers of respondents are due to missing values.

  6. The values equal: 0 “not at all”, 1 “<3 weeks”, 2 “1–3 months”, 3 “4–6 months”, 4 “more than 6 months”.

  7. Transmigrants might as well move between more than two countries or between countries other than their country of origin. For the sake of clarity, the arguably most common case was regarded in this paper.

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  1. Institute of Sociology and Social Psychology, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany

    Sascha Riedel

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Riedel, S. The Problems of Assessing Transnational Mobility: Identifying Latent Groups of Immigrants in Germany Using Factor Mixture Analysis. Soc Indic Res 131, 271–290 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-016-1246-0

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