Migration and adaptation capabilities, aspirations and strategies of displaced Ukrainians in Berlin, Warsaw and Budapest: A longitudinal qualitative panel analysis

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Céline Teney
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 540099140

This project investigates the migration and adaptation capabilities, aspirations, and strategies of Ukrainians who fled from their home country to Berlin, Budapest, or Warsaw after the Russian invasion on the 24th of February 2022 over time. I propose investigating this target group with a comparative longitudinal study based on a qualitative data collection. Together with a team of Ukrainian research assistants, we conducted semi-structured interviews in Spring 2022 and Winter 2022-23 of the same sample of 75 displaced Ukrainians in Berlin, 65 displaced Ukrainians in Warsaw and 28 displaced Ukrainians in Budapest. The interviews cover the topics of displaced Ukrainians´ migration experience, their further migration plans and expectations, their adaptation experiences, aspirations, and strategies in multiple social and economic aspects, and the resources they can draw on for navigating as displaced migrants in their place of residence. Thanks to collecting the participants´ digital contact information, I can conduct follow-up interviews of participants who returned to Ukraine or moved to a third country. This allows me to capture challenges and ways of adaptation for those on the move and those who returned. While I could cover the costs of the first two data collection waves, I need further funding to carry on this longitudinal qualitative panel data collection. Furthermore, additional funding would cover the costs of archiving and anonymizing the collected data, providing a unique common good for the scientific community. The overall project´s goal is to understand the capabilities, aspirations, and strategies of displaced Ukrainians regarding migration and adaptation under the constraints of their forced migration and the origin and host contexts. My cross-national longitudinal qualitative panel research design will enable me to answer two main research questions: (1) how do the characteristics of origin and host contexts shape the migration and adaptation capabilities, aspirations, and strategies of displaced Ukrainians? (2) to what extent do the migration and adaptation capabilities, aspirations, and strategies of displaced Ukrainians change over time?

• DFG Programme: Research Grants