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Study

The CILS4EU project focuses on the intergenerational integration of children of immigrants in four European countries: Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and England. Started in 2010, it is the first comprehensive and fully-standardized panel study on this topic in Europe.

Design

Children of immigrants and their ethnic majority peers at age 14, as well as their parents and teachers, were interviewed for the first time in the school year 2010/2011. The adolescents were subsequently surveyed again twice over the next two years, thus covering a crucial, formative period of their lives. More information on the study's design can be found here.

After these first three years, the harmonized portion of the CILS4EU data collection was complete. After this, each country team independently conducted different follow-up studies. More information on the follow-up studies is available here.

Topics

Based on the CILS4EU data, it is possible to investigate the complex causal interplay between the processes of structural, social, and cultural integration. The project starts from the assumption that only thereby one can account for the important differences between countries, ethnic groups, and domains of life.

There is a substantial body of prior research on the integration of the second generation in Europe that has already taken steps to reveal important differences. However, CILS4EU is the first project to collect data on immigrants' children in Europe that satisfies different important needs sufficiently: large-scale, strictly comparative, theory-guided, multilevel and longitudinal. More information on the study's main topics can be found here.

Organization

CILS4EU is a joint project of researchers from England, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden. It is originally located at the universities of Mannheim, Utrecht, Tilburg, Oxford and Stockholm. You can find more information about the organizers of the study here.

Availability

All data is made available to the international research community for public use. This not only results in research contributions by the CILS4EU project team, but also contributes to the establishiment of an enduring data infrastructure for research on the intergenerational integration of immigrants in Europe. You can read more about data access here.