Seminar: Kasia Karpinska – Intergenerational ties across borders

Intergenerational ties across borders: a typology of the relationships between Polish migrants in the Netherlands and their ageing parents

The question of how intergenerational relationships are maintained when family members reside in different countries has been gaining scholarly attention. However, those studies focus mostly on the so-called “old migrant” groups. The focus on the “new migrants” from Central and Eastern Europe is still scarce. In this paper, we examine the transnational ties between Polish migrants in the Netherlands and their parents living in Poland. To identify types of transnational ties, we performed a latent class analysis using data on 970 men and women from the Families of Poles in the Netherlands (FPN) study. Following earlier studies on adult child-parent relationships in transnational context, we combined information on upward and downward emotional support, upward financial and practical support and frequency of contact (face-to-face and via communication technologies) and commitment to norms of filial obligation. Three types of transnational child-parent relationships were

distinguished: harmonious, detached and obligatory. Multinomial analyses showed that that background characteristics of the adult children and their parents rather than the time that had lapsed since the arrival in the Netherlands accounted for variability in relationship type. The relatively high probability of face-to-face contacts even in detached ties is characteristic of the strong commitment to family life among people of Polish descent.

Biography

Dr. Karpinska earned her Ph.D degree from Utrecht University School of Economics (USE) in 2013. In her dissertation she studied factors that may affect manager’s decisions to hire, retain and train older workers and the role of manager’s attitudes on those decisions. To this goal she designed several vignettes experiments.

Kasia is currently involved in the ERC-funded ‘Families in Context’ project and is coordinating the data collection among Polish migrants in the Netherlands.