REMOSM

REMOSM stands for “Remitted Osmosis”, a short name for Remitted Osmosis. Changing social values at origin due to emigration. This is the main project currently carried out by our team, which is financed through the UEFISCDI grant PN-III-P4-ID-PCE-2016-0245.

A simple idea fundaments the project: International migration works as a two-way osmotic membrane within the fabric of social norms and values. Migration connects societies and leads to mediated exposure to a foreign culture. We test the changes in values due to emigration. The perspective is the one of the country of origin: people leave the country, but they keep contact with the ones left behind, exposing them to borrowed social values. Our quest is to identify the changes.

To do so, we employ Romania as a good example. With a large and still recent outmigration, the country is the perfect field to look at migration as natural experiment that allows testing theory from sociology of values.

The 2017 waves of EVS and WVS provide most of data. WVS is run as a panel survey, starting from the 2012 sample. Data is collected in November-December 2017. EVS is collected in January-Feabruary 2018, and allows extending the sample. Both surveys were subcontracted to IRES and MMT, which work as consortium. Full details on the REMOSM project comes from the initial application.

Three other researches complete the picture: We intend to repeat the 2008 emigrant survey (also panel, to be carried out in January 2018 as websuvey). A more extended websurvey with Romanian emigrants to selected countries is also planned. A found raising campaign is in place for this (estimated costs: 4500 Euro). A qualitative research of expats to Bucharest intends to build a more refined image of how Romanian changes under the impact of migration.