Quantitative research of the factors in external labour migration of Ukraine’s population in their

cross-country and internal dimensions

Here we would like to describe the methodology, the programme and the key features in the design, procedures and tools applied for research in EUMAGINE. The authors of the project were trying to take into account the previous experiences in external migration research in Ukraine, namely, to dispose of probably the most widespread disadvantage of such studies – excessive ethno-centrism.

The international project “EUMAGINE: Imagining Europe from the outside” was carried out by the consortium of universi-ties and research centres from February 2010 till January 2013 in four countries. The cross-national dimension of this project is quite impressive  – Ukraine, Turkey, Morocco and Senegal.

All four countries are the starting points in the quite numerous migration outflows to the EU.

The EUMAGINE project had quite an ambitious aim – to apply a rather non-Eurocentric approach to assessment of a wide range of socioeconomic, cultural and political contexts of migration as well as the microlevel variables of the related mass discourse and intentions of migration to the EU countries.

Obviously, when the research goes beyond national borders, it creates additional requirements for research teams and puts for-ward additional methodological problems, widely known as the dilemma of maximum quality: research framework, methods and tools are maximally adjusted to the local context under study;

however, further comparison of separate cases is rather problem-atic. On the other hand, there is the consistent quality approach, under which the research design, methods and tools remain unchanged; however, there are risks that the local specificity of the context would be lost, left out of research scope.

Within the project in question this dilemma was solved in the following way: the quantitative side of the project presupposed the use of the common for the entire toolkit, without any adaptations, but local specificity was still taken into consideration because the qualitative methods and tools were also applied (the semistruc-tured interviews with experts and representatives of power).

The quantitative part of the research was represented by the survey covering 500 people at each of the 16 territories (that is, 8000 respondents overall). The random selection method was used to get the sample of respondents aged between 18 and 39.

Below we present the analysis of the quantitative component of the research for which SPSS was used. In the following subchapter we will present the analysis of the qualitative components (NVivo software package applied).

In Ukraine four territories were chosen for the research. Just like in three other countries, the criteria of the “theoretical sam-ple” have been considered during the selection: Solomyanskyi dis-trict of Kyiv (the territory with a high positive saldo of migration within the country); Zbarazkyi district of Ternopil oblast (the ter-ritory with high indicators of external migration); Znamyanskyi district of Kirovogradska oblast (the territory with a low indicator of external migration) and Novovodolazskyi district of Kharkiv oblast (the territory with a high indicator of external migration and a rather specific situation with human rights).

The quantitative side of the project covered the issues related to the household’s composition, external migration experience, availability of relatives abroad, migration intentions (rather abstract or more specific and exact), the desired directions for migration, the evaluation of the situation in the home country and in European countries (as the leading choice between the desired directions for external migration).

While studying the perception of the situation in receiv-ing countries, the notion of “geographical imaginations” was applied. This concept means the subjective perception by a per-son of space, specific locations, people residing there and politi-cal and economic opportunities related to these specific places in question. Such perceptions/imaginations are formed partially chaotically, in the regular course of everyday life, and partially intentionally – under the influence of specific political and cul-tural discourses. They can also be “inherited”, since such imagi-nations are part of national identity formation. Regardless of the level of objectiveness in such geographical imaginations, in time they tend to actualize since they may have very explicit, material-ized consequences, just as any other cultural symbolic construct.

While studying the migration intentions the following screen-ing question was used: “Ideally, if you had an opportunity to go abroad to live and work there for the next five years – would you go or stay in your country?” The answers to this question demon-strated that in all the studied territories the share of females with migration intentions ranged from 25% to 76%, while for males this variation was from 43% to 90%. Thus, in all the studied ter-ritories the share of respondents with migration intentions was higher among men than among women (a drastic difference in this regard was also observed in Turkey). We can assume that such distribution was influenced by the traditional gender per-ceptions of the role of man (the breadwinner, ready for hardships and risks for the sake of his family) and that of woman (the pre-server of the hearth).

Further, we determined the preferences in migration destina-tions among the respondents who had confirmed their migration intentions. In three other countries, aside from Ukraine, the most preferred destination was always the EU, while for the Ukrainians the most desired destinations were Germany, the USA, Russia and Italy (that is, generally speaking, the preferred destination is not exactly European, but “Western”). The actual statistical leader in Ukrainian emigration is the Russian Federation; however, in the

“wish list” of countries for migration, this country is ranked only the fourth. Obviously, one of the key reasons for that is a much easier migration regime between Ukraine and Russia. However, it is worth noting here that this data was gathered before the annex-ation of Crimea and further geopolitical and military conflict in the border region between the two countries. Most probably, at the time of publication, the results in terms of both actual statis-tics and respondents’ answers would be very much different.