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CILS4EU

The CILS4EU project is dedicated to the comparative analysis of the development of immigrants' progeny. In its current form, it is the first comprehensive and fully-standardized panel study on this topic in Europe – a unique opportunity for researchers all over the world to study the internal processes leading to intergenerational integration.

We start from the general assumption that it is the complex causal interplay between integration dimensions which needs to be understood and disentangled in order to account for cross-group and cross-country differences in Europe.

A unique opportunity

Answering questions related to integration requires large-scale, strictly comparative, theory-guided, multilevel, and longitudinal data - data that was not available in Europe before the CILS4EU project. Following the example of the prominent "Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study" (CILS) that was conducted the United States, we managed to collect rich panel information on teenagers in four European countries: Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and England.

We started interviewing children of immigrants and their native peers at age 14 in the year 2010, and followed up with them over the next two years, thus covering a crucial, formative period of their lives. Overall, more than 18,000 students participated in the first wave of the survey.

An enduring data infrastructure

All data is made available to the international research community for public use. Furthermore, the CILS4EU project is now the starting point of an even more comprehensive panel study: After completion of the original CILS4EU data collection (waves 1-3), more data was collected in country-specific follow-up projects.

Thus, in addition to our own research contributions, we start building up an enduring data infrastructure for research on intergenerational integration of immigrants in Europe.