2000 Families: Migration Histories of Turks in Europe

The project

2000 Families: Migration Histories of Turks in Europe is a study by an international team of researchers looking at whether migrants gain or lose from migration and how the lives of their descendants change over time.

The University of Essex-led project begins with 2000 Turkish men born between 1920 and 1945 from five distinct regions in Turkey. It tracks the journeys to nine European countries of 1600 of them, following not just their lives, but the lives of their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren wherever they are in the world. It also follows the lives and families of some 400 Turks who could have migrated but chose not to and compares their lives with those who left.

In total the project has gathered information about some 50,000 participants.

The €2.5m project which has been running since 2009 was funded by NORFACE (New Opportunities for Research Funding Agency Co-operation in Europe).

Its approach differs significantly from similar migration research projects because it compares the lives of those who left Turkey for Europe with those who stayed behind.

The data

A major output of the research is an unprecedented data set, which will be made available to researchers in 2016. It has already been used by the academics behind the project in a range of influential research which offers a new and illuminating perspective on migration.

My role

I am co-investigator on the project and have been actively involved in the design and collection of the data. My research using the data so far has focused on friendships, social networks and gender; and on life satisfaction of migrants and stayers. Further research on identities and social mobility is planned.

My project outputs

More information

  • Visit the project website, which includes more background on the project, podcasts with other members of the research team and a range of other resources.