Children’s well-being in diverse migration contexts: Goals, design, and preliminary findings from the FAMELO project

Abstract

Migration is an increasingly prevalent demographic behavior that has important consequences for families and communities around the world. Families and households play a central role in shaping migration decisions; in turn, migrants can produce important economic returns to the households from which they originate. Both migration decisions and eventual remittances have important implications for children’s development and future opportunities. Yet, we know comparatively little about the dynamic role migration may play in children’s lives. A core challenge in understanding commonalities and differences in the way family migration context is linked to children’s development is the difficulty in comparing associations across studies that use different definitions of migration and different conceptualizations of children’s development. The Family Migration Context and Early Life Outcomes (FAMELO) project begins to fill these gaps by conducting comparable longitudinal surveys of children and their caregivers in households with and without migrants in three traditional sending areas: Jalisco, Mexico; Gaza, Mozambique; and Chitwan, Nepal. This paper describes the conceptual framework, preliminary field work and initial analyses of pilot data collected for the FAMELO project.