Measuring Fine-Grained Multidimensional Integration Using Mobile Phone Metadata: The Case of Syrian Refugees in Turkey

Abstract

The current Syrian civil war has led to a mass migration of Syrian refugees into Turkey. As the Syrian conflict has intensified and lengthened, many refugees have faced challenges integrating into their host societies. Here we introduce and evaluate different measures extracted from mobile phone metadata to study integration of refugees along three dimensions: (1) social integration, (2) spatial integration, and (3) economic integration through signatures of employment activity. We use these measures to compare integration across different regions in Turkey and find striking differences both in the distributions of these dimensions and the relations between them. Finally, leveraging the results from two general elections in Turkey in 2015 and 2018, we confirm earlier findings concerning the impact of refugee presence on voting behavior and demonstrate that we can better explain voting behavior by incorporating integration metrics.