Immigrant children and their parents: Is there an intergenerational interdependence of integration into social networks?

Abstract

The paper investigates the integration of immigrant children and their parents in different dimensions of social networks – referred to as multiplexity in social network terminology. These dimensions are children's friendships, their attendance at birthday parties, and contact among their parents. By attending birthday parties, children's friendships are publicly reinforced and membership in a social circle is signified. During these events, communication and social exchange drive the process of social integration at the micro-level, and ethnic boundaries can be shifted or blurred. It will be shown that a variety of homophily effects can be found in all three network dimensions. In addition, ethnic segregation in parents’ networks has an impact on children's participation in these events and, thereby, on children's integration in social networks. However, the causal effect in the other way around – children's birthday party attendance on contact among their parents – is even stronger. A new approach is the non-recursive analysis of how ties in one network dimension effect ties in another dimension. Analyses are based on 76 social networks of 1266 children in school classes in the city state of Bremen, Germany.