The Daily Lives of Newcomers: A Multinational Study of Immigrants' Experiences in Western Europe.

This website contains a description of an ongoing study of the daily lives of people who have recently immigrated to Europe. The site contains a rationale for the project, descriptions of the samples, the various translations of the instruments that are being used in the study, and contact information for the investigators. Researchers who are interested in collaborating with the working group are encouraged to contact the project coordinator, John Nezlek, jbnezl@wm.edu.

Click here to read a summry of symposium to be given at the upcoming meeting of the International Association of Cross-Cultural Psychology Symposium submission

The study and its rationale

The influx of people into Western Europe from nations outside of Western Europe has become the focus of considerable attention from all sorts of social scientists. The study we are conducting is meant to complement previous and ongoing research on immigration into Western Europe. Although informative, we believe that previous research is limited in two important ways. First, there has been a tendency to examine this topic from the perspective of the established residents. For example, what do people whose families have lived in a certain country for generations think of people who have recently arrived, and how do they behave toward newcomers? Second, virtually all of the research has focused on broad issues, and much of it has relied on single assessment questionnaires. In contrast, our project examines this topic from the perspective of the newcomer, and uses intensive repeated measures methods to examine the day to day lives of such people. We believe that our study provides a much needed complement to existing research.

As presently designed, the study focuses on immigrants to Western Europe from predominantly Muslim countries. Muslim immigrants were chosen for various reasons. Socio-politically, Muslim immigration to Western Europe is a topic of considerable interest across all of Europe and much of the Muslim world. We hope (eventually) to contribute information that will help policy makers make better decisions about this complex topic. Psychologically, Muslim immigration to Western Europe presents an outstanding opportunity to examine identity change, formation, and maintenance because of the possible sharp differences between immigrants' cultures of origin and the cultures of their new homes. Moreover, studying basic psychological processes in such a population should be able to provide information about the generalizability of findings based on studies of meaningfully different populations (students, established residents, etc.).

The methods and focus of the study reflect numerous trends in social, personality, and cross-cultural psychology. Methodologically, the use of the types of diary methods we are using has increased dramatically in the past 20 years. There are many reasons for this, one of the most important of which is the fact that such methods can answer questions that cannot be answered well or at all by either laboratory methods or survey studies. For example, if you are interested in knowing if newcomers react differently to social contacts with other newcomers and than they do to contacts with established residents, you need to obtain their reactions to such different interactions. Such comparisons can be made in the laboratory or in a survey questionnaire, but there are serious shortcomings with both of these methods. The laboratory provides control over the situation, but in the process, can destroy the very thing that is the object of study. A survey questionnaire can be very good at measuring broad attitudes, but such attitudes may not be closely related to everyday life. Moreover, unless people complete surveys numerous times or go through numerous experimental procedures, the descriptions they provide will naturally be limited to the specific times and circumstances under which the measures were taken. The types of methods we are using are not perfect, but they do provide accurate descriptions of the lives of people, and that is the topic in which we are interested. More information about these research strategies can be found at Demonstration site for diary methods

Theoretically, the measures we are using reflect numerous positions. One of the more important of these is research on identity development and maintenance, with a dual emphasis on identity as an individually situated construct and as a social construction. We do not think that individually- and socially-based approaches to identity are mutually exclusive. Quite the opposite, we think of them as complementary. The study is also informed by recent work on daily emotional experience and its relationships to various aspects of personality. What are the daily emotional lives of newcomers like, and are relationships between daily emotional experience and personality the same for newcomers as they have been found to be for established residents? The various topics that we will be addressing in scientific papers are too numerous to describe here. More detailed descriptions of the specific issues the study concerns will be posted on this website as papers are prepared.

Für eine deutschsprachiger Beschreibung der Studie bitte hier klicken: Deutsch

Links to sites:

Netherlands Site homepage
Germany Site homepage
Greece Site homepage
Poland Site homepage

Links to measures:

English Versions:
English Version, Interaction Diary Instructions
English Version, Interaction Diary Form
English Version, Daily Events
English Version, Daily Form
English Version, Trait measures, pdf file

Dutch Versions:
Dutch Version, Interaction Diary Form
Dutch Version, Daily Events
Dutch Version, Daily Form

German Versions:
German Version, Interaction Diary Form
German Version, Daily Events
German Version, Daily Form

Polish Versions (in Russian):
Polish/Russian Version, Interaction Diary Form -- Word document
Polish/Russian Version, Interaction Diary Form Instructions -- Word document
Polish/Russian Version, Trait measures -- Word document