By Maryam Aslany, Tone Sommerfelt and Jørgen Carling
This report is devoted to the study of migration aspirations. It relies on an approach that sees migration as a two-step process, differentiating between migration aspirations and migration behaviour, originally formulated as the aspiration/ability model of migration by Jørgen Carling (2002).
The concept of “migration aspirations” is an umbrella term that encompasses a range of thoughts and feeling about future migration, including desires, wishes, intentions, and hopes to migrate (Carling, 2019). Rather than macro-economic data and absolute measurements of living standard and wealth, the authors explore influences on migration aspirations by zooming in on the effects of measured and subjective dimensions of standard of living.
The document is structured as following: Firstly, based on empirical material produced a decade ago, in 16 different research areas across four countries, the authors explore how interviewees in semi-structured, qualitative interviews, articulate different dimensions of standard of living. Secondly, they analyse survey data from these same localities to investigate the impact of different measurements of standard of living on migration aspirations, and which measures turn out to be the most salient.