Hot off the presses

Elżbieta M. Goździak introduces her new article on the role of education in migrant families' decision-making

With our project in its third year, we have been busy analyzing collected data and preparing them for publications. Today, I want to mention my own article that is part of a special issue of Studia Migracyjne on migrant decision making, co-edited by Ewa Ślęzak-Belowska and Agnieszka Bielewska. The article is already available in Online First.

Family migration and decision-making

Family migration involves complex decision-making about leaving, staying, and returning. Factors affecting family decision-making are as numerous as they are diverse. Additionally, family migration requires on-going decision-making since migration is not a singular event that begins with movement and ends with settlement.

In this article, I analyze decision-making processes among a diverse group of migrant families residing in Poznań and Wrocław, Poland. The families are diverse in the sense that they include families headed by single parents (mainly mothers, but also fathers) and families with two mainly but not exclusively heterosexual parents. In some families, all members share the same ethnic origin, but some include parents who hail from two different countries and have children who were born in yet another country. Several of the families lived in more than one country before coming to Poland. What unites them is the presence of school age children.

Findings and identified themes

The major themes that emerged from the ethnographic research, included narratives about leaving a home country, staying in Poland, and planning (or not) to return to the country of origin. Within each of these themes I analyzed narratives concerning the role of education in the migrants’ decision-making.

Leaving

My interlocutors enumerated a myriad of reasons that resulted in the decision to leave their home country. Most had hard time identifying the main reasons, let alone naming just one. There were, however, three exceptions where the singular reason for coming to Poland was the education of their children.

Staying

Whether the families in my study came to settle in Poland permanently, as was the case of some mixed families with a Polish parent, or came to spend a few years in the country, they all had to make decisions regarding schooling for their children. They had to decide whther they wanted to enroll their children in a public or private school. Their decions were also related to the level of Polish language fluency of their children and/or a desire to master the Polish language.

Planing to return

Although many migrants do not always go back, the imagined return persists in their minds for a long time. In this study, parents and children talked about return at different junctions of their stay in Poland, including shortly after arrival or much later when teens were considering their future.

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I hope I wetted your appetite and you will read the full paper. If you want to cite it, please use the following citation:

Elżbieta, Goździak. "The Role of Children’s Education in Family Decision-Making Strategies among Migrants in Poland" Studia Migracyjne – Przegląd Polonijny. Apr 17, 2025. https://ejournals.eu/czasopismo/smpp/artykul/the-role-of-childrens-education-in-family-decision-making-strategies-among-migrants-in-poland