Transnational educational biographies: Self-selection and institutional selection of adult immigrants into education

成年后移民到德国的移民在何种程度和何种情况下参与教育？该项目旨在分析个人、社会和结构的决定因素，以及个人的主观理解，以及制度法规和包容与排斥的实践。因此，该项目致力于不平等社会学的核心问题：自我选择和社会机构选择的相互作用，并参考成年移民在跨国生活过程中的教育差异进行调查。中等和高等正规教育以及非正规专业培训是值得关注的，因为从广义上讲，在东道国获得的教育增加了移民找到就业，特别是找到合格工作的机会。鉴于成年移民平均参与教育的频率低于德国本土同龄人，该项目对移民进行了详细的群体内比较。研究设计结合了定量和定性方法以及制度分析。首先，基于美国国家教育小组研究（National Educational Panel study， NEPS）对成人的二次分析，基于回溯性的纵向生命历程数据，从广义的历史视角探讨教育参与的程度和类型。其次，劳动力市场和社会保障小组（PASS）的分析侧重于失业移民和政府资助的培训和教育。多变量分析旨在确定各种结构决定因素的相关性、相对效应大小和适度性。第三，对学历未被德国机构认可的移民进行面试，并将在德国接受正规或非正规教育的移民与未接受正规或非正规教育的移民进行比较。这一定性研究将阐明关于移民教育（非）参与途径的主观解释。移民如何处理外国文凭贬值的经历与新的本土文化资本积累之间潜在的紧张关系的问题尤其令人感兴趣。第四，对2005年至2014年前后教育系统、移民法和积极劳动力市场政策的法律规定进行分析，将有助于发现东道国机构的选择机制。对国营就业中心、咨询服务机构和教育机构的机构参与者的专家访谈将成为分析机构选择实践的基础。分析的这一部分将侧重于描述被认为适合进行培训和教育的移民类型，以及在这些选择过程中针对移民的具体方面。

To what extent and under what circumstances do immigrants who immigrate to Germany as adults participate in education? The project seeks to analyze individual, social, and structural determinants as well as subjective sense-making on the part of individuals on the one hand as well as institutional regulations and practices of inclusion and exclusion on the other. Hence, the project is dedicated to a core question of the sociology of inequality: the interaction of self-selection and selection by social institutions, investigated with reference to educational disparities between adult immigrants in their transnational life courses. Secondary and tertiary formal education as well as non-formal professional training are of interest because, broadly speaking, education attained in the host country boosts the chances of immigrants to find employment and qualified jobs in particular. Given that adult immigrants on average participate less often in education than their native peers in Germany, the projects undertakes a detailed intra-group comparison among immigrants. The research design combines quantitative and qualitative methods as well as institutional analysis. First, secondary analysis based on the study of the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) on adults explores the extent and kind of educational participation in a broad historical perspective based on retrospective longitudinal life-course data. Second, analyses of the Panel Labor Market and Social Security (PASS) focus on unemployed immigrants and government-sponsored training and education in the second half of the 2000s. Multivariate analyses aim to determine the relevance, relative effect size, and moderation of various structural determinants. Third, immigrants whose academic credentials were not recognized by German institutions will be interviewed and those who participate in formal or non-formal education in Germany are compared to those who do not. This qualitative study will shed light on subjective interpretations of immigrants regarding their paths to educational (non-)participation. The question how immigrants deal with the potential tension between the experience of devaluation of their foreign diplomas and the accumulation of new native cultural capital is of particular interest. Fourth, analyses of legal regulations in the education system, in immigration law and active labor-market policies in the period of 2005 to ca. 2014 will help to detect mechanisms of selection by host-country institutions. Expert interviews with institutional actors of state-run job centers, counseling services, and educational organizations will form the basis for an analysis of practices of institutional selection. This part of the analysis will focus on the portrayal of the kind of immigrants deemed suitable for training and education and on migrant-specific aspects in these selection processes.