1: Introduction: Situating Children of Migrants across Borders and Origin: Claudio Bolzman, Laura Bernardi, Jean-Marie Le Goff -- Part I: Comparison as Key Methodological Tool ad Challenging Perspective in Study of the Children of Migrants: 2: Damned of you do, Damned if you don’t: The Challenges of Including and Comparing the Children of Immigrants in European Survey Data: Laurence Lessard-Philips, Silvia Galandini, Helge de Valk, Rosita Fibbi -- 3: Risk Factors of Labor-Market Insertion for Children of Immigrants in Switzerland: Andrés Guarin and Emmanuel Rousseaux -- 4: The Presence of a Third Person in Face-to-Face Interviews with Immigrants Descendants: Patterns, Determinants and Effects: Nadja Milewski and Danny Otto -- Part II: Life Course Perspective and Mixed-Methods Approaches in the Study of Children of Migrants -- 5: Analyzing Second-Generation Trajectories from a Life Course Approach: What Mixed Methods can Offer: Ingrid Tucci -- 6: Intergenerational Relationships in Migrant Families. Theoretical and Methodological Issues: Claudine Attias-Donfut and Joanne Cook -- 7: Using a Cohort Survey to Track the Entry into Adult Life of Young People from Immigrant Backgrounds: Emmanuelle Santelli -- 8: Combining in-depth Biographical Interviews with the LIVES History Calendar in Studying the Life Course of Children of Immigrants: Andrés Gomensoro and Raúl Burgos Paredes -- 9: Participatory Qualitative Methodology: a promising Pathway for the Study of Intergenerational Relations within Migrant Families: Michèle Vatz Laaroussi -- Part III The Biography and the Identity of Immigrant Descendants as a Negotiation Process -- 10: Studying Second-Generation Transitions into Adulthood in Switzerland: a Biographical Approach: Eva Mey -- 11: National Identity and the Integration of the Children of Immigrants: Rosa Aparicio and Andrés Tornos -- Part IV Transnational Approach and Children of Migrants: Beyond Methodological Nationalism -- 12: Beyond Home and Return: Negotiating Religious Identity across Time and Space Through the Prism of the American Experience: Peggy Levitt, Kristen Lucken, Melissa Barnett -- 13: Following People, Visiting Places, and Reconstructuring Networks. Researching the Spanish Second Generation in Switzerland: Marina Richter and Michael Nollert -- 14: Mapping Transnational Networks of Care from a Multi-Actor and Multi-sited Perspective: Valentina Mazzucato, Ernestina Dankyi, Miranda Poeze -- 15 Index.

Open Access

This open access wide-ranging collation of papers examines a host of issues in studying second-generation immigrants, their life courses, and their relations with older generations. Tightly focused on methodological aspects, both quantitative and qualitative, the volume features the work of authors from numerous countries, from differing disciplines, and approaches. A key addition in a corpus of literature which has until now been restricted to studying the childhood, adolescence and youth of the children of immigrants, the material includes analysis of longitudinal and transnational efforts to address challenges such as defining the population to be studied, and the difficulties of follow-up research that spans both time and geographic space.   In addition to perceptive reviews of extant literature, chapters also detail work in surveying the children of immigrants in Europe, the USA, and elsewhere. Authors address key questions such as the complexities of surveying each generation in families where parents have migrated and left children in their country of origin, and the epistemological advances in methodology which now challenge assumptions based on the Westphalian nation-state paradigm. The book is in part an outgrowth of temporal factors (immigrants’ children are now reaching adulthood in more significant numbers), but also reflects the added sophistication and sensitivity of social science surveys. In linking theoretical and methodological factors, it shows just how much the study of these second generations, and their families, can be enriched by evolving methodologies. This book is open access under a CC BY license.  This is the best book we have about the methodology to conduct research on the second generation or the children of immigrants and their integration in the countries they reside. Claudio Bolzman, Laura Bernardi and Jean-Marie Le Goff have convened a large number of renowned scholars from different countries to reflect on the life course perspective, the use of quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods and the transnational approach. Prof. Rafael Alarcón Acosta, El Colegio de la Frontera Norte. .