First MIGNEX article is published in a scientific journal

Much of the analysis in MIGNEX is based on comparisons between our 25 research areas. These areas cover a rich diversity of experiences across Africa, the Middle East and Asia but the selection presents a tricky number of cases to work with. The number of MIGNEX research areas are too many for anyone to really get to know in-depth and too few for statistical analysis.

To tackle this challenge we will use Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), a systematic method for analysing patterns of similarities and differences among a group of cases. Although QCA methodology is increasingly used across the social sciences, it is not well established in migration studies.

MIGNEX researchers Mathias Czaika and Marie Godin set out to examine the opportunities and challenges of using QCA in analysing the two-way relationships between migration and development. Their work resulted in a MIGNEX Background Paper that was published in 2019 and informed the preparations of data collection for the project. The MIGNEX Background Paper on QCA was subsequently revised as a journal article and submitted to the journal Migration and Development. It has now been published as an article with the title ‘Disentangling the migration-development nexus using QCA’.

Publishing our work beyond the project and in scientific journals is essential for anchoring our research in scientific communities and safeguarding the standards of research. However, publication in scientific journals depends on peer review processes and editorial decisions, meaning we cannot promise published articles as outputs from a research project. In MIGNEX we have therefore planned the Background Papers series with the aim of revising the texts into journal articles. This article is the first of hopefully many journal articles based on MIGNEX research.