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IAB Colloquium

The discussion series "Labour Market and Occupational Research (IAB-Colloquium zur Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung)" is a forum where primarily external researchers present the results of their work and discuss these with experts from IAB. Practitioners from the political, administrative and business fields are naturally also welcome.

Return Migrations of Ukrainian Refugees: The Role of National Identity and Pride

IAB-Colloquium with Volodymyr Vakhitov, PhD, American University Kyiv

We conducted a poll of 1139 Ukrainians who currently live in Poland. 937 of them took refuge after the start of the full-scale russian invasion on Feb. 24, 2022, and the other 202 migrated earlier. Our major focus was on the return intentions of Ukrainians and how these intentions may depend on the feeling of national identity and pride. In the pre-registered hypotheses, we stated that a stronger national identity was positively associated with the willingness to return home and that we could amplify this willingness by making the identity more salient.

In the survey, we randomly exposed individuals to three priming settings. Two of them primed subjects towards enhancing identity and pride feelings, while the third group contained neutral questions for a control group. Then, we measured the key variables of interest (return intentions) and found strong support for the first hypothesis and unexpected results for the other.

One of the most unexpected findings is the negative average effect of “pride priming” on return intentions of forced displaced persons, with a positive gradient along the levels of national pride. In fact, people with initially low levels of pride express strictly negative return intentions, whereas people with high pride are more likely to return. At the same time, pre-war migrants have not been affected by our priming experiment, which suggests more stable staying preferences in this group.

Date

11.12.2024

, 9.30 a.m. until 10.30 a.m.

Venue

Institute for Employment Research
Regensburger Straße 104
90478 Nürnberg
Room Re100 E10

or online via MS Teams

Registration

Researchers who like to participate, please send an e-mail to IAB.Colloquium@iab.de