The Future of Diverse and Disadvantaged Neighborhoods in the Nordic Welfare States — The Voices of Residents

Research Questions

Global migration is one of the so-called megatrends that shapes the world in the 21^st century. For the Nordic countries, this megatrend has led to rapidly increasing ethnic diversification. The transformation towards ethnic diversity is most tangible in the urban neighborhoods where first and second-generation immigrants of diverse origin have clustered. These neighborhoods are typically disadvantaged in terms of characteristics associated with wellbeing, prosperity and political influence. Socially deprived neighborhoods are not new to the Nordic welfare states, but the combination with diversity generates a dynamic of its own with, potentially, strong centrifugal forces. The development of these diverse and disadvantaged neighborhoods is vital as the Nordic welfare state take on the societal challenges that follows from diversification. At stake, ultimately, is local and national social cohesion.

Our research project will fill a void in public discourse on this societal challenge by providing a collective voice to the residents of the neighborhoods in question. Surveys with representative samples of citizens is a primary mean of understanding how people relate to society, but for reasons linked to (lack of) accessibility and (limited) political power this opportunity for collective voice has only rarely been granted to the residents of diverse and disadvantaged neighborhoods. To correct for this imbalance, we will conduct quality panel surveys with residents of targeted local neighborhoods in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. By striving for fully representative samples, which would include groups that do not usually participate in surveys – people with limited knowledge of the native language is an example – we ensure that the complex reality on the ground will be brought to public attention. And by comparing across the Nordic countries, we are positioned to identify factors that are common for diverse and disadvantaged neighborhoods in the Nordic Welfare states, as well as factors that are unique to specific national contexts.

We focus attention on two broad sets of views and beliefs related to social cohesion. The first set captures residents’ relationship to the larger national community. Central concepts here are social and institutional trust, national and group identities, perceived agency, and feelings of discrimination. The second set captures internal relationships in the neighborhood. Central concepts here are local social and institutional trust, intergroup attitudes, neighborhood satisfaction, neighborhood reputation, and place attachment. In addition to social cohesion, we will measure perceptions of social mobility, social justice, and economic fairness, as well as social norms related to these perceptions. These questions will tap potential for social unrest and to what extent social norms are diverging from the total population.

When identifying determinants of views and beliefs we will pay attention to two theoretically important characteristics. First, with reference to the so called “integration paradox,” we will highlight the contrasts between first and second-generation immigrants to see how intergenerational differences plays out in local neighborhoods. Second, in order to go beyond the ascribed identity “immigrant,” we will acknowledge the relevance of characteristics that are tied to ethnic and national origin as well as religious denominations. A useful feature of our study is that we can compare immigrants of the same ethnicity in different “integration regimes”.

An additional aim of the project is methodological. We aspire to develop a blueprint for quality surveys of hard-to-reach-populations in diverse and disadvantaged neighborhoods and beyond. To that end, we will organize the surveys to systematically evaluate issues related to sampling, recruitment, interviewer effects, and mode effects.

Research design

We will rely on indicators of deprivation, such as poverty and low employment levels, to select local neighborhoods that are among the most deprived in each country. Based on our experience, we suspect that many will refuse to participate in the study so we will approach residents in several waves to ensure that we get a sufficient sample of respondents from each neighborhood. This approach implies that some residents will be contacted more than once, i.e. we will have a smaller individual-level panel within the cross-sectional data structure. The panel structure will be useful to examine the stability of responses and to assess measurement errors, which is potential problem in a survey like this. Since all countries have excellent administrative data, it is possible to compare our sample to the total population in the area. The survey will include survey experiments, such as list experiments, which are useful when one wants to study responses to sensitive questions that can have high levels of social desirability bias.

We will rely on well-established survey items to capture our key concepts, such as questions used in the European Social Survey and similar comparative survey programs. This is important because we want to examine how local evaluations of these concepts differ from those of the general public, and it allows us to examine how well population-wide surveys manage to capture the views of marginalized citizens.

Respondents with immigrant background will be given a slightly longer survey that includes the Immigrant Integration Index developed by Stanford Immigration Policy Lab. This index is developed to cover six important dimensions of immigrant integration.

Data collection

The core data collection is a mixed-mode two-wave survey panel with representative samples of residents aged 16 or older in diverse and disadvantaged neighborhoods in Aarhus, Helsinki, Oslo and Gothenburg (two neighborhoods per country). We will apply the following practices: to use locally anchored enumerators with broad language skills in survey recruitment; to do the interviews in multiple languages; to offer participants monetary incentives; to sample on randomly selected apartment building addresses; to visit each apartment in the sample three times at different time points, and with the ambition to interview all individuals in the household. At the end of the initial face-to-face interview, respondents will be probed about their willingness to participate in a follow-up on-line survey. Respondents who volunteer, provide their mobile phone number and/or email address for continued contacts.