Encountering Statistics
Unlike many of my peers, my background was not linear and I had not come from a sociology background – instead I trained in psychology, statistics and then international development. My experience in psychology meant that I was very comfortable with individual level data but was unfamiliar and apprehensive of using aggregate data often switzerland rcs data integral to censuses, social surveys, or administrative datasets. Realising the benefits of looking at migration from a mixed methods approach and given the relatively recent release of the Census 2011, I knew that this presented an unique opportunity to use this data. Therefore I had to confront my nerves and with the information and assistance of the UK data service navigated the extensive census data releases eventually ending up using the Census 2011 key statistics, micro data and commissioning my own origin-destination data file.
My mixed methods approach to migration research has come from two different avenues. Firstly, migration studies have often looked either at the patterns of migration using quantitative data or the experiences of migrants from a qualitative perspective and I wanted to bridge this divide. And use quantitative data to explore the patterns of migration and then the qualitative interview data to unpack and drill down into some of the factors that shaped Polish peoples’ migration decisions. Secondly, as described in my biography, I have come from a background where I worked with asylum seekers and refugees and I wanted to maximise the use of each type of data to tell a story about the migration very much from a migrants’ perspective.